B: I find it concerning that $25k is a notable donation; is the Foundation doing that poorly? I would have hoped this number to have two more digits in it for it to be a front page worthy item.
These days when we find ourselves needing to write a script our first go-to would be bash, and if we need more features or if it's going to be complex enough to have to worry about maintenance costs we'd probably reach for python.
TIL that there is a non-profit foundation that focuses, in part, on supporting Perl. That surprises me to the same extent that I would be surprised to learn that there is a foundation aimed at supporting VB6 (though now watch someone is going to share that there is).
For this year's London Perl & Raku workshop I shortlisted 70 companies to look for sponsorship. That was with minimal research and effort. These ranged from long term ("legacy") users of Perl to startups. From small companies to very large and profitable fintechs. I cover this briefly in the talk I gave at the end of the workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el7qHRpEDeE
Yes, there is far less Perl than there was 20 years ago. But Perl was everywhere at one point, and the halflife of programming languages is long so it's still in a lot of places. Programming languages don't die, they just stop being talked about in favour of the shiny new ones.
You're largely preaching to the choir, I don't disagree with anything you said.
As a web application developer who got started professionally in the 1990s, I not only vividly remember Perl being everywhere, I actively wrote a lot of it.
However, in my more recent experience, it is more likely to hear people talk about COBOL, FORTRAN or C++ than it is to discuss Perl. All of those languages predate Perl.
Java also still gets a ton of discussion and it's not shiny and new anymore.
Most of us who spent time writing and maintaining Perl in the 1990s were all too willing to abandon it in favour of other languages with similar features, not because they were shiny and new but because of major pain points with Perl (it earned the meme that it's a write-only language). In my opinion, Perl's greatest contribution and staying power was it's regex engine and syntax which persists.
I don't even like python, for what it's worth, but it's popular for more reasons than it just being "shiny and new" (to the extent that you can even say that about python these days).
My main issue is that "People still use Perl?" has essentially become a meme at this point. I'm relatively sure that any sufficiently commented on or upvoted thread on HN gets that statement in it somewhere.
Yes, Perl is still used. Extensively. People and companies just don't talk about it. That's the problem with Perl these days.
(Personally I think TAP and CPAN were Perl's greatest contributions, as I was never a heavy user of regexp).
Why not?
I don't know. I could speculate:
* The Perl they have is so low maintenance they don't think about it much
* Or they're planning to rewrite it but haven't yet got around to it... after more than a decade?
* They have nobody working on it that is vocal about it or active in the community/blogsphere/etc
* The company policy is to not talk about it
* Or talk about any tech they use - think: banks, large enterprise, fintech
* Or they're successful enough they don't feel the need to talk about it
* They're open source tools or distros that have a mass of other tech so Perl gets ignored even though its practically embedded - Linux distros, git, etc
* The Perl is on the periphery, or not the core logic - test suites (memcached for example), used in build systems, pipelines, Make, oneliners, etc
There's a similar story around javascript - note how es6(?) introduced `"use strict"`. Old school javascript always struck me as a bit like crippled perl with really good vendor support.
I am constantly parsing reports and then generating commands to run from that. I learned Perl in the 90's and it still works great for that.
I have to code in Tcl for most of our EDA tools (chip design) but I still parse reports in Perl. The younger engineers use Python and I've learned enough but I really don't care. I'm not writing big systems or anything in Perl or Python. It's the Tcl code that has tens of thousands of lines because that is what the tools require.
Honestly, I write about a script a quarter in Perl, but it definitely is handy now and then.
I'm not here to judge. I still prefer to write my python scripts like it's the 2.7 days... (more effort goes to python "code")
The only other language I use much for scripting is Javascript, or rather Jscript, for our accounting department sometimes needs files munged for integration into Great Plains, and I can count on cscript being on the machine and running such scripts.
'I know Perl' people != 'I know Python' people
Perl was/is just so powerful, people have used to do all kinds of things that most people probably don't even have idea can be done. Its some what similar to the power of macros in vim/emacs. People(especially young) are often surprised you can just open vim on a ec2 instance and do something in 30 seconds, they were planning to spend hours/days doing using java+bash or something.
I have both seen and done, people build such extreme, big and hard things with Perl and so quickly, that I'm sure somebody without that context would find it hard to imagine. Im sure you can do in Python, anything you can do in Perl. But definitely not in the same time, not the same size and more importantly- not often.
Programming culture has been trading tool power for beginners ease for decades now, and the market is swamped with tools that appeal and work only for beginners not for advanced users.
In its hey days Perl programmers would do things in a weekend, what the neighbouring Java team had 12 people and a year to do. There is a reason so much was built in Perl in those days. But like most things, money increased, people had lots of time and budget to get things done. Beginner tools got used more often. Perl also got its reputation as a hard to use tool around that time.
But honestly I see so much manual drudgery these days. Its irritating to see that as a Perl programmer. There is nothing more sad that watching people do work, that must be done by a program.
Languages systems or environments have still other deep features themselves. The library or module systems in Python or Perl or Raku do not work the same.
Being able to write "a short, personally useful script.", is a great start. And does not count as "knowing Python" except for the purpose of inflated resumes. The clichés of complaining about "line noise" or WORN (write once read never) - since the fine article was about Perl - counts specifically as "not having learned Perl".
You need better peers
I mean, what's there to talk about? It's there, it works, not an exciting subject. It's like municipal water (if you have it), it's indespensible, but what is there to say about it. (Unless it has stuff in it you don't want)
I did get some flack for writing a perl script for work recently, but I had some rubbish to list, and it does the job quite well.
Open source is largely a thing because lots of people voluntarily invest (valuable!) time on their own in my opinion (with corporate sponsorship being almost negligible by comparison).
The entire idea that open source is volunteer work is largely a myth when it comes to popular open source. Even the ones where you think it's volunteer work they do so much during their working hours that either they're lying to their employer or it's sponsored by their employer.
And it's still easy for individuals to at least contribute detailed problem reports even to very large projects. And these are useful. Even when ignored by the lead mafia.
Look at Wikipedia. They are grossly OVER-funded, they have more money they could ever need in fact And they run purely on donations.
I always wanted to donate for Firefox but they don't offer me an option to do so.
Or look at Gimp: https://www.gimp.org/donating/
Not clear call to action. Lot's of confusion options. Not the best marketing.
Open source would be much better with sustainable funding models. But hard to see how this could happen in SaaS dominated modern world.
People love to shit on crypto, but no other industry got so many small-scale, open source projects that got funded when people have high hopes of making bank from it.
I wonder if we could get people to invest in open source projects that were tied to a short position on the proprietary counterpart.
Not sure the oss community can keep up.
I usually buy books from most projects I use, do occasional donations to projects when they are relevant enough for my work,...
But to answer the bigger question, yes, I think this was a bit weird. I was also on the board for a while, and I think we did not do a good job of reporting on and monitoring financials. This was one of my frustrations with the organization, and part of the reason I stepped down from the board (though there were other, bigger, reasons not related to the board as well).
In fact, I had made the same points as Makoto does in his blog post maybe 1-2 years earlier in a board meeting. We were running a constant deficit and we didn't seem to have a clear plan for what we would do if that continued.
I wish the Perl foundation good luck.
Not sure what the path out here is? Seems like either finding deep pockets that care about their work or some new revenue stream, but without the cash to fund it I’m not sure how.
I started playing with Ubuntu in 2006. Exploring the system, I'd come across system scripts in perl here and there, but Lennart Poettering has gradually displaced these with unit files that are much easier to read.
These days I may invoke perl occasionally. A few years back I used checkconfig.pl to build a slimmed-down kernel config for an embedded board. I expect it will eventually be phased out of these peripheral utilities.
Many of the big Perl names long moved on; CPAN is full of abandoned modules. And the world doesn't sit still.
So as time goes by, there's more and more risk of you finding out that some Perl module you're using no longer works. It may not build because of API changes in the C library, or the API of some web service changed, or there isn't an API at all for some pretty big thing that showed up 3 years ago.
That didn't use to be the case.
You know, I hear this a lot (especially earlier in my career) but I _never_ ran into any system made in perl, ever. I started my professional career in early ~2010 and have been programming since ~2005.
Maybe they are just very black box-y and I don't even know that the underlying stack is perl?
Thanks to globalisation, those times are long gone. Any mediocre developer can find a local employer that pays at least that much.
DDG is not responsible for the greed of companies that contribute zero.
I applaude DDG's decision. Their move is pragmatic and a lot more inspiring to the companies out there than day-dreaming of a single company donating 7- or 8-digit to the Perl community (which, frankly, would not be sane either).