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Geizhals Preisvergleich Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation
- Aldipower 1y agoGreat to see they support and still use Perl. Geizhals is a very usable and functional product and price comparison page. Looks a little bit old, but that is exactly what I like. Geizhals is associated with the Heise Verlag, that is what I do not like so much, because there was a steady decline in quality in the recent years.
- Asmod4n 1y agoThey had some very recent UI overhauls, it looks more friendly now.
- nik736 1y agoMore friendly, less usable
- pixelpoet 1y agoYeah I'm hugely frustrated by their recent updates that hide / obfuscate the filters, which is basically the main way you want to use the site. I'm pretty sure it's yet another casualty of optimising for phone normies :(
- sjn 1y agoI agree! The filters made be go to the site, and I don't even live in any of the markets they serve! (Though I do visit, and sometimes buy tings based on what I've found through the site).
- stefs 1y agoi just went back to check (i've already been there today) and there's an option "always show filters" in the upper right corner.
- pixelpoet 1y agoGood to know, thanks. I was looking for something like that but couldn't find it last time, maybe it's new? Still makes about as much sense to me as Google adding a "always show search box" option that defaults to off :D
- Asmod4n 1y agoHm, I only miss one thing, sorting by price with shipping cost. Can’t see anything else that was removed, just changed.
- the_mitsuhiko 1y ago> Hm, I only miss one thing, sorting by price with shipping cost. Not sure if that's missing on the international site, but if you select "inkl. Versand" in the filter box then the sort includes shipping.
- jagermo 1y agostill the best filters, i think. You can filter stuff so deeply, its crazy.
- whiteboardr 1y agoUsername checks out : )
- l5870uoo9y 1y agoUI-wise it reminds me of Craigslist.
- Aldipower 1y agoYes, I think this is a good thing. :-)
- kiviuq 1y ago> Geizhals is associated with the Heise Verlag Afaik, Heise Verlag is the owner of Geizhals
- lazyjones 1y agoHaters will say a major factor in still using Perl is the difficulty to replace up to 25+ years old Perl code written at startup pace AND the difficulty to teach old Perl devs a new language.
- tosh 1y agodid not know (or forgot) that they were using Perl Geizhals is a huge price comparison app in the german speaking market.
- amiga386 1y agoSee also the little-known website Booking.com
- patates 1y agobooking uses Perl? that's one of the web sites that gives me the irrational "the backend must be Java" feeling. can't explain why though.
- lysace 1y agoGot curious. Seems like they have been a heavy Perl shop from the beginning. Their backend developer job ads appear to be oddly programming language neutral which I assume means they're still using Perl a lot. (Been there, done that, when recruiting for work in an unusual programming language.)
- whilenot-dev 1y agoI don't think they're comparable... I read stories on how a paid reservation at Booking.com isn't a guaranteed stay at a hotel. Geizhals gives you the stock and availability infos right on the results page. Seems like one is making better use of Perl that the other.
- joz1-k 1y agoAnd according to "DuckDuckGo Hiring" page, the DuckDuckGo search engine still uses Perl 5 in their backend.
- gjvc 1y ago"Geizhals Preisvergleich began in July of 1997 as a hobby project—and yes, “Geizhals” literally translates to “skinflint” in English" yup
- jijijijij 1y agoThe name is really horrible. Insanely ugly German word. Guess, one has to choose between Goethe or Perl docs.
- zeroc8 1y agoFor me as a german speaker it is kind of humoruous that they called it that way. I guess similar to Yahoo for english speakers. Anyway, I'm still using that site for my electronic purchases. It reminds me of a past, more likable internet (before social media).
- lazyjones 1y agoThe domain was a gift by the founders of inode (former Austrian ISP) and the website grew pretty fast after the brand change in 1999. But it curiously turned out that while Austrians mostly like the name (notable exeptions were delusional marketing people of "premium brands" considering advertising on the site), Germans are really not so fond of it. Cultural differences, I suppose.
- jijijijij 1y agoI think it mostly hasn’t aged well. Idk, seems like a relict of an era when people couldn’t have foreseen how language and the internet have evolved. This kind if vulgarity was en vogue in marketing once, kinda boomer stuff. Also, I wasn’t aware it's Austrian, or I wouldn’t have made the Goethe remark. Thanks for the background info!
- distances 1y agoI'm not a native speaker but I like the name.
- wtcactus 1y agoI check this site several times to get an idea what is the market price of something in the real world (i.e. outside Amazon). Also, it’s very good at keeping tabs on the features of some products (best place I found to compare motherboards per features, something surprisingly difficult to do). Unfortunately it’s very German centric and I live in Portugal, so I’ve only actually bought something from a link I’ve got there once.
- noja 1y agoUK link: https://skinflint.co.uk https://skinflint.co.uk
- tdhz77 1y agoIt’s hard to believe that 10k is worth whatever they need from Perl in 2025. I wrote Perl for many years while I worked on the godforsaken cmecf system. Cmecf this year announced it had been hacked by Russian hackers. This means that cmecf written in Perl allowed a country access to Federal Court evidence including intelligence gathering methods, corporate secrets, and inside sources. Perl is not memory safe, loaded with security issues for over a decade. It’s only saving grace is string manipulation, which is exactly why the best hackers in the world all know it.
- Aldipower 1y agoPerl is not memory safe? Are there pointers directly to memory like in C? No, it is an interpreted language that runs opcode in the Perl virtual machine. Sure, there are quite some safety concerns with Perl, but they can be mitigated. For example there is the taint mode with "-T" that prevents direct execution of system commands. Would I use Perl for a new project? No. :-) I would be interested in more details about the cmecf hack!?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kstrauser 1y agoWas the bug in Perl or its libraries, or in the code written in Perl? There are many valid criticisms of Perl, but I've never heard of the language itself described as insecure, and especially not memory-unsafe. I don't know how I'd write a use-after-free or stack smash in Perl if I were forced to.
- misja111 1y agoWhy is this news? Because it's so little? 10K will pay a developer for 2 months maybe ..
- mrweasel 1y agoThe Perl Foundation has a goal to get more smaller donations, rather than a few large ones and it seems like they've been doing okay lately. You're probably correct that this could better be summed up later in the year as one single news item. In terms of getting publicity and attracting more donation, announcing and discussing each "small" donation might be better.
- a1371 1y agoI was impressed to see at the new keynote that Blender is successfully shifting its revenue growth to small donations. So it can be done.
- sho_hn 1y agoThis is also true for KDE e.V., where we've evolved from a roughly 50:50 split between corporate and individual donations to now about 75% of the donations (which have overall increased multi-fold) coming from individuals, many of whom are on recurring plans.
- colesantiago 1y agoThis is better than nothing at all? I've seen many promising and still in use open source languages and projects that barely even get $500 a month in contributions. Yet these projects have added value in the millions to startups that never give back to these projects because $500-$1000 a month is 'too expensive' for them.
- chmod775 1y agoYou might call that on brand given their name.
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- franticgecko3 1y agoI've started learning (in 2025!) and using Perl lately as shell++ It's extremely stable, installed almost everywhere, and has much fewer insane idosyncrasies than shell. I can write some Perl and confidently hand it to a colleague where it will almost certainly work on their machine. It's a shame it's so dead, for a scripting language there's nothing else that ticks the same boxes. I would never write systems software with it, of course
- andrewl-hn 1y agoMy go-to use case for modern Perl is to be the default program instead of sed. Sed regex support is abysmal and the same command line flags behave differently between BSD (and macOS) and GNU versions, in particular the `-i` for doing replacements - the number one use case for the program. So, this means that many shell one-liners and small scripts don't really work the same way on macOS and on Linux, and it's pretty annoying. Perl is straight up better. You need to remember one word: pie - for it's command line options, and now you can do: ``` echo "John Doe" > name.txt perl -p -i -e 's/(?<first>\w+)\s+(?<last>\w+)/"$+{last}, $+{first}"/e' name.txt # name.txt after the command: `Doe, John` ``` First of all, it woks the same way across platforms. Second, you get all sorts of goodies: named capture groups, lookahead and lookbehind matching, unicode, you can write multiline regexes using extended syntax if you do something complicated. And finally, if your shell script needs some logic: functions, ifs, or loops, Perl is straight up better than Bash. Some of you will say "I'll do it in Python", and I agree. But if your script is mostly calling other tools like git, find, make, etc, then Perl like Bash can just call them in backticks instead of wrapping things into arrays and strings. It just reads better. BTW Ruby can do it, too, so it's another good option.
- nicwolff 1y agoI remember π and e and type perl -pi -e '...' file.txt
- mpyne 1y agoAnd if you are using a newer Perl they sometimes add features that aren't enabled by default unless you opt-in with a 'use v5.38' style declaration. If you want those features on in your one-liner you can use -E instead of -e perl -pi -E '...' file.txt (I used to need this long ago when I wanted to use the then-new "say" in my one-liners)
- lifeisstillgood 1y agoThere is a problem somewhere deep in capitalist economies. The model has served humanity well - from Napoleon to Neo-Liberal the world has seen vaccines, space flight, farming revolutions and sewage plants giving longer better life to billions. But … OSS is like a bellwether - the foundations of this great wealth need investment and maintenance else we build on rotting timbers. And when a major global e-commerce platform chucks a few Weeks salary of a junior developer in SV and we call it worth mentioning, we need to find a new way to shore up those foundations. I don’t have a good answer - I suspect I need to look deeper at the real problem - but it does seem to be a real problem
- Aldipower 1y agoOn the flip side, freedom is related to independence. If a company would heavily fund the Perl society or another FOSS, it would become dependent and loosing it's freedom. Freedom is something you cannot count or measure with capitalist thinking, but it does not mean there is no value to it.
- whatever1 1y agoThe model we have works for used packages. If a package is used by a large company and requires maintenance, the company pays its engineers to do it, and the rest of us receive the updates for free due to the license. However, the system breaks down for packages that are not used by major companies (or are stable and safe enough to avoid triggering an alarm). There is no viable way to fund continuous support for every forgotten open-source project.
- scotty79 1y agoEntire ad industry should be replaced by price comparison web service ran by single state monopoly.
- elAhmo 1y agoGeizhals is a great example of a sustainable business, working for almost three decades to improve their product and give users what they want. Glad to see them giving back to the community and hoping that they remain in this marker so Idealo has some competition.
- jagermo 1y agoGeizhals is powering heise compilate, the affiliate/revenue generating platform for the heise publishing house. Basically, it allows you to add prices for products or categories to websites, competing with the "shop this on amazon" affiliate links if websites want to give customers different options than amazon. Link in German: https://compaliate.heise.de/ https://compaliate.heise.de/