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Perl Programming

Perl Foundation Awards Perl Development Grant to Larry Wall 137

Posted by timothy from the who-better dept.
Krellis writes: "The Perl Foundation today announced that they have awarded a Perl Development Grant to Larry Wall, the creator of Perl and designer of Perl 6, joining Dan Sugalski and Dr. Damian Conway, the other 2002 grant recipients. The Perl Development Grants are funded by donations; over USD 80,000 has been donated so far, a total of USD 240,000 is needed for the three grants. See http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ for more information on how you can pitch in - every dollar counts! See also the use.perl.org story for more information."
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Perl Foundation Awards Perl Development Grant to Larry Wall More

Perl Foundation Awards Perl Development Grant to Larry Wall

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  • Well, duh! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PeterClark ( 324270 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @10:31PM (#2959700) Journal
    I hate to say the obvious, but why wasn't he the _first_ one that the grant was awarded to? After all, he is only the creator and lead architect of PERL. Are there any blindly obvious reasons why this didn't happen earlier?
    :Peter

    • Re:Well, duh! (Score:4, Informative)

      by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdeversNO@SPAMcis.usouthal.edu> on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @11:55PM (#2959968) Homepage Journal
      As I understand it, Larry Wall is/was an employee of O'Reilly, but I don't think he had any job duties per se; rather it was more of a patronage for him to keep working on Perl while he was on their payroll. (Think of how the Medici family sponsored artists during the Italian Renaissance -- same idea here.)

      With the establishment of this new Perl Foundation, maybe the idea is to formalize these kinds of patronages for key developers. Damien Conway was first because he's such a great teacher & advocate, and Dan Sugalski was second because he needed more time to work on the Parrot engine for Perl6. Now that Larry is joining this, hopefully he'll have more time to work on the high level language specification...

    • Re:Well, duh! (Score:3, Informative)

      by cjcollier ( 115316 )
      Mr. Wall was until recently employed by O'Reilly and Associates. I believe that the perl community (C/O YAS) was looking to sponsor those who didn't have a job where they could spend great ammounts of time working on Perl. When Larry fell into this category, they jumped at the opportunity to add him to the roster. or at least that's how I see it. I'm glad they've given us the opportunity to support Larry and the whole of the Perl community. I hope we can compensate him as well as ORA did.

      • Re:Well, duh! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by ichimunki ( 194887 )
        So if Larry no longer has O'Reilly's patronage, can I safely assume it's time to stop buying their books? The fact that they directly supported this pillar of the Perl community was one good reason to overlook the incredibly proprietary way they publish books about Free Software (contrast "Programming Ruby" by Dave Thomas and Andrew Hunt, published by Addison-Wesley and available under a fairly Free license).

        • Re:Well, duh! (Score:3, Informative)

          by chromatic ( 9471 )
          O'Reilly is willing to make books available in similar ways (redistributable and modifiable provided you make the copyright and changes clear) -- it's usually the choice of the author. Look at their Running Samba or Open Sources books for examples. (I know there's a link to a page somewhere that describes this in more detail, but I can't find it. You'll just have to trust me for now. :|)
          • I trust you-- and you are thinking of http://oreilly.com/openbook/. They are still strong advocates for "open source", and they have released under free licenses when they go out of print. Still other books they have started out with the goal to have them released as open content of some sort. In any case, their books are incredibly good quality.

            But if Larry is no longer being patronized by ORA, it does impact my willingness to buy their books (especially the Perl-specific ones). In spite of the non-free nature of the Perl books I've bought from ORA, I always considered them (in part) a donation towards further development of Perl.

            Here's a better question: will the next versions of the Camel (for Perl 6) be licensed under the same terms as Perl itself? Or is the Perl community being asked to donate to fund development of a language which they will then have to buy proprietary books from O'Reilly to learn more about?

            I know I'm being a zealous stickler, but here's a better essay on the topic than I could write: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html. And FWIW, I'm willing to pay *more* for a printed version of a Free book than I would be willing to pay for a non-Free version of same. Freedom is worth something.
            • I respect the FSF opinion on documentation, but I'm not in complete agreement. As an author, I can seriously say that the advance for my book *did* fund some work on Perl itself. (Whether or not anything besides Regexp::English was impressive or useful, you be the judge. :) Parts of the book wouldn't have worked as documentation, and parts of the book wouldn't have been done, period, if it were not a book.

              With regard to O'Reilly and Perl, don't forget that ORA still donates to YAS [yetanother.org], hosts Perl.com [perl.com], purchasing and publishing articles and news, and employs or partially funds people involved with Perl -- Nat Torkington, Jon Orwant, Simon Cozens (editing Perl.com). They're also paying royalties to Larry, Tom Christiansen, Tim Bunce, Randal Schwartz, Doug McEachern, Lincoln Stein, Jarkko Hietaniemi, et al.

              Finally, I might point out that Perl's fine documentation is both voluminous and very close to the Camel in many spots. Some of the same people who work on Perl books (writing and editing) work on the FAQ and the included POD.

              It may not be as direct a donation to Perl development as when Larry was a direct patron, but I think the company is still doing Good things. There will always be free resources for people to use, but I have no problem supporting good publishers like O'Reilly and Manning. If someone can set up a trust to produce free-as-in-speech documentation, I'll support that project too.

    • First, it's Perl not PERL.

      Second, I would imagine it's because Larry has been employed by O'Reilly for the last couple of years, making it less of a 'need' for Larry's work to continue on via a grant.

      -Bill

  • Cart Before the Horse (Score:5, Insightful)

    by solman ( 121604 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @10:32PM (#2959706)
    Am I the only one who thinks it is a bad idea to announce the awards before the money has been raised to pay for them?

    The could have delayed the announcement, made fewer awards or made smaller awards.

    Now, instead of focusing their efforts on raising money for future activities, they instead have to focus on digging out of a $160K hole.
    • Look at it this way: At least sponsors can see what their money is buying! I don't foresee them having any problem coming up with the money... besides, they have that wonderful paragraph about people feeling warm and fuzzy about the generousity of contributers, especially people who contributed early on.
    • The Polaris Foundation today announced an award of $1 million to Polaris, in recognition of his occasional postings to Slashdot discussions. A total of $1 has been raised so far, and donations to make up the difference can be made at the Foundation's website.
  • is here [www.iki.fi].
  • Perl Foundation Awards Perl Development Grant to Perl Creator

    Scott.
    • Note that they don't even have the money to donate yet. You'd think one would wait until they did before making an announcement of it. In fact, at this rate it could take a while to achieve their goal. And... my gawd, did you see all the typos on that site? I was physically painful.
  • Surely, if you're considering a grant Larry is going to be the first name on the list!

    It seems a bit like a Linux foundation (is there one?) giving money to Alan Cox & Marcelo Tosatti and then as an afterthought letting Linus Torvalds in on the party ...
    • an afterthought eh? what ever happened to "thou must respect thy parents"? =)

    • I think it's quite appropriate that Larry be number 3. If I remember correctly, the other two recipients were younger developers (college or post grad). These developers had no other means of income and were contributing greatly to Perl 6. Thus the grants enabled them to continue their work.

      Larry on the other hand has other sources of income and didn't really need the grant as much. Now it seems that the Perl Foundation would like Larry to travel more to promote Perl. Since travel is pretty costly the Perl Foundation wanted to help Larry defer some of those costs.

      • Of the two previous ( slash current ) recipients of the grant, the first was a college professor -- not a student -- who used the patronage to travel the world teaching Perl to people, and the second had been a gainfully employed member of a search engine company who is going to be using his grant year to work on Perl6's core engine. It's not exactly that they were unemployable... :)

    • Re:Great! But why is Larry no.3? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Krellis ( 19116 ) <.gro.sillerk. .ta. .todhsals.> on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @11:59PM (#2959985) Homepage
      Larry was, up until October, funded by O'Reilly [oreilly.com] to continue his development of Perl. Unfortunately, in the economic climate that we are all facing, ORA had to make the decision to lay off Larry in October, after 5 years of supporting him. The previous two grants were arranged and planned when it was assumed that Larry would still be working. When that ceased to be the case, things were brought together such that Larry could also be brought on board.
    • Is that actually conceivable?
    • No conspiracy or disrespect--Larry only recently stepped forward to say "you know, if you wanted to save me from the time sink of a day job, I could get through this perl6 thing a whole lot faster." (my words, not his). Dan and Damian have been on the cards since late last year.

      --Nathan Torkington

  • Best way to use money? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lkaos ( 187507 ) <anthony@NOspaM.codemonkey.ws> on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @10:53PM (#2959791) Homepage Journal
    Is issuing grants the best way (from a taxation perspective) to use these donations?

    If the Perl Foundation is a non-profit (which I assume they are), wouldn't it make more sense to take these guys on the pay-roll so that the money wasn't taxed except for the consideribly smaller amount that would be paid for general living expenses?

    The 20K travel budget is what suprised me... Since that's a grant, it's not 20K for travel because Larry would still have to pay taxes on that no?

    I'm not terribly proficent in tax laws but something just seems a bit fishy to me... I wonder if it has to do with whether one can claim that writing perl is charity...

    If it isn't, then there definitely needs to be a movement to make OSS a charitable act because it certainly is. I know there was a /. thread about this but I remember it being rather ambiguous.
    • Yeah, the travel budget had me over a barrel there as well. If he's supposed to be working on Perl 6, why would they want him to be travelling extensively? Well there would be conferences, but if he's a guest speaker, usually the conference would pay for it correct?

      So, they gave him a grant for a vacation?
      • In the current economic climate, travel stipends from conferences are going way down, and sometimes even being eliminated. Then there are also talks to smaller groups, which can't necessarily afford to fly someone out to see them, but would get a great benefit (and hopefully give back in some way, too) from having a visit; local Perl Mongers [pm.org] groups, to name just one example.

      • Re:Best way to use money? (Score:5, Informative)

        by gnat ( 1960 ) on Wednesday February 06, 2002 @01:39AM (#2960273)
        Ha! Vacation? No. The travel budget comes from our goal of keeping the people we fund active in the community. That means sending them to conferences like YAPC [yapc.org] and OSCON [oreilly.com], as well as regular trips to see other Perl Monger groups.

        Damian has set the bar very high in this regard--see the start of his 2002 schedule [yetanother.org], and read his 2001 diary [yetanother.org] to see how much he gets around. While I doubt Larry and Dan will be travelling internationally as much as Damian, we do want them to visit user groups outside their home town.

        In an ideal world, a conference would pay Larry to be Larry. Unfortunately, you might have noticed that this world isn't ideal. Larry has to pay his own way to conferences, just like everyone else.

        --Nathan Torkington

  • Isn't it bad policy? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    To grant people money you don't have. As we all should be able to admit, too, most people using something that comes for free generally aren't too willing to donate money to an associated organization. [This is similar to why selling OSS isn't a viable business model - services, probably but OSS, no.]

    • Re:Isn't it bad policy? (Score:2, Informative)

      by gnat ( 1960 )
      We're not granting people money we don't have. We've issued 4-month grants to Damian and Larry, and a 3-month grant to Dan. That's what we do have money for. During the coming months, we'll be fundraising to raise the rest of the year's money so we can make further grants.

      As for freeness being an issue, we're actually surprised at how readily people will donate. It's just a matter of having someone on the ground to make the presentation and explain the benefits. Dan's going to be handling that part-time for the duration of his grant, and we expect great things as a result.

      So yes, it is bad policy to grant money you don't have. Fortunately for us, we're not doing that :-)

      Nathan Torkington

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jsse ( 254124 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @11:04PM (#2959824) Homepage Journal
    Last Thursday, the Microsoft's community received a boost when Microsoft chose software developer Bill Gates as the first recipient of the Microsoft Foundation grant. Microsoft initially donated an estimated $500,000 worth of hardware and software. See http://www.microsoft.com/catalog/default.asp?subid =22 [microsoft.com] for more information on how you can pitch in - every dollar counts!

    "We're pleased to be able to let Bill focus on golf without distraction," said Craig Mundie, lead moron of the Microsoft Foundation. "Through these grants, the support of the monopolization -- including sizeable amounts from victims, can be put to use for the good of everyone!"

    Yes, I'm just kidding, you can mod me down now. *close his eyes*
    • Actually, having a different opinion here is okay, as long as the opinion is pro-linux or anti-microsoft.

      Kind of like freedom of religion is acceptable in america, as long as that religion is Christianity.

      (Note the allegory requires you to accept the fact that the judging party is a small, but visible, minority.)
      • Actually, having a different opinion here is okay, as long as the opinion is pro-linux or anti-microsoft.

        Kind of like freedom of religion is acceptable in america, as long as that religion is Christianity.

        Heh, I can't agree more! XD

        Take it easy man. :)
  • Could be that this is just a way to honor him and he will never see the cash.

    The article said they did not have a enough money for all of the grants and Damian Conway had to have the cash to take the break from the university down under. They are shy of about $160,000 which may take a little while to dig up..:)

    Sound good to me.
    BWP
    • It's real--the checks went out last week. The idea is to get people started on their good work, rather than waiting for however long it takes to raise the rest of the cash. Part of Dan's duties will be to raise the rest of the money. Having someone without the distractions of a day job (I edit books, Kevin runs a company) to handle the corporate fundraising should make the rest of the money easier to raise.

      --Nat

  • At the risk of being curmudgeonly... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pdqlamb ( 10952 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @11:55PM (#2959967)
    Damion Conway was a professor, who took a sabbatical to do his perl thing this year. Larry Wall was an O'Reilly employee, the last I heard, and was being paid to develop (wait for it) perl. So what's the story behind the story here? Is ORA looking for help to pay Larry's salary, or just a tax deduction, or is something else going on

  • Larry Wall's Fence (Score:3, Interesting)

    by OYAHHH ( 322809 ) on Wednesday February 06, 2002 @12:10AM (#2960027)
    A former co-worker of mine told me this story one day. I got a kick out of it.

    Anyway, apparently my co-worker's fence to the rear of his house had deteriorated to a severe state so he decided to repair it.

    Being the polite guy (and probably wanting a little help with the funding of such a project) he is, my co-worker decided to contact the neighbors, all of whom he indicated he didn't know at all.

    So he set off around the opposite side of the block to knock on the neighbors door directly behind his house. A gentleman comes to the door and my co-worker introduces himself and the gentleman introduces himself as Larry Wall.

    My co-worker doesn't recognize the name since he really doesn't program to any extreme degree, more of a planning/management type guy.

    But since the company is a software development house he knows several people who use Perl and they describe what they do with it on an almost daily basis. Thus he is aware of Perl.

    So apparently the chit-chat continues on and the topic eventually comes to what each person does for a living.

    My co-worker describes his job and then Larry says that he is currently writing a book for O'Reilly.

    My co-worker is definitely intrigued by this answer and asks what sort of book and Larry describes that it's a book detailing the (is his a more appropriate adjective here) latest version of Perl.

    When my co-worker hears the word Perl he gets all excited. His reaction was basically that it's pretty cool to have a neighbor who has contributed so much to the programming community.

    Anyway to make an already long story shorter my understanding is that Larry was really cool about the fence, basically letting my co-worker take care of the details (the way my co-worker wanted them) and I believe he helped with the cost as well.

    So if you contribute to the Perl Development Grant be aware that you are helping support some really nice folks! And that is to be commended!

    I hope I got the details correct, at least that's how I remember them....

  • warning: this is just the situation as I see it and have heard.. no official quotes or insider info here

    Larry Wall is the founder of Perl, yes.. however, usually he does less active development on the language itself, usually stepping into settle a dispute or submitting the occasional patch.. Since the Perl 6 initiative was launched, he has been busier than in recent years, because of the RFC approval process and being the lead architect for Perl 6.

    Damian Conway, in the past year, has contributed (IMHO) enormously to the popularity, usefulness and general knowledge of Perl.. he's toured giving talks and lectures, written more modules per week than even an ordinarily active Perl programmer would write in an year (Ok, some of them, I don't get, and others leave me just scratching my head..) As I understand it, he was given the grant so he could take a sabbatical from his university and concentrate on Perl full time for one year..

    so, its irrelevant as to who gets it and in which order.. certainly, I think Larry Wall should get a grant, but to point fingers and question why he wasn't the first to get it, is simply to make a superficial assessment without knowing the facts behind the grants..

    One final note: last year, the powers that be committed to funding Damian Conway, and it worked out well, even though they promised money that they hadn't collected (at that point). If you use Perl in any way, please consider making a donation..

    I'm personally rooting for Dan Sugalski to work some more on Perl threads :o) hope he finds time for it in the course of the year...

  • It is an icon aware world, and people like to receive some sort of notoriety or publicity for making contributions to charities. For example stickers such as "i gave blood" or "World Wildlife Fund" are prevalent.

    Why not generate a cool gif that people can display on their web sites to signify that they contribute to the Perl Foundation. Might encourage contributions.

  • huh? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by SpacePunk ( 17960 )
    I wonder if the Microsoft Foundation will be giving a grant to Bill Gates.

    • Re:huh? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pne ( 93383 )

      With the small difference that Microsoft is a company that makes money, and Bill Gates is presumably an employee who already receives salary or benefits or whatever someone at that level gets. The Perl community does not, of itself, make money, and Larry is not employed by the community -- well, until now.

      A better comparison might be if the Linux community paid Linus Torvalds. As it is, he works for Transmeta; if he didn't, he probably wouldn't be making any money. Similar with Larry.

  • Kudos, but not yet... (Score:3)

    by chuckw ( 15728 ) on Wednesday February 06, 2002 @02:57AM (#2960403) Homepage Journal
    Kudos to the Perl community. They are building something truly great here. However, I won't give them a dime until they put more effort into being a bit nicer to people who need help. Personally, I've found them to be extremely helpful and a great resource. I've also seen them be downright nasty and arrogant towards people they perceive to be less than "elite". I know there's been some effort to do that in the past, however it seems to have died out from a public image point of view.
  • Damian is an amazing person. He breathes life into topics that might otherwise be dull. He is a great speaker. He is highly self motivated - has the ability to stay on the road for months at a time. He is one of those people who always seems to be bursting with energy.

    IMHO he is far to focused on himself. He has a fine set of tools to sell himself and does so extremely well. Take a look at any interview with him. He is always ranting about how busy he is and how much work he is doing.

    I knew Damian from college. Even though he was my supervisor it was impossible to spend any quality time with him. He was always off touring foreign countries for conferences (at this time his obsession was with the then trendy C++), or working on a paper so that he could go overseas again to present it. Otherwise he was at the gym.

    I did not learn much from Damian. He did make one thing _very_ obvious though - always look after number one. Also to a lesser extent - the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you do a good enough job of telling everyone how good you are, eventually it will stick.

    Damian is good at determining who to rub shoulders with and whose palms require oil.

    I supported him getting the first award because he evangelizes my favorite language so well (and as a side effect himself). I object like that he may be getting another. He is a player. It sickens me that he has managed to big note himself into further support from our community - one that places product above politics.

    Larry would be better off working on the design of Perl 6 without him. Larry is a wonderful man - to me he embodies up the language that I love. He is a quiet achiever who does not need to sell himself - his work does that for him. Do we really need to pay someone to churn out another Exegesis?

    I say allow showy Damian be an instructor on his own time (and dollar) - or better still a politician. Then he can jet around the globe all he likes. That is what he does best. It would also mean he would have to spend his _own_ time working on those damn Latin modules.....
    • Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I respectfully disagree. I've worked closely with Damian since 1998 or so, and he's never once been disingenuous or greedy. Your idea of his character is the complete opposite of my experience--perhaps a grad student's opinion of their advisor isn't the most unbiased?

      As for his contribution to Perl and Perl 6, make no mistake that it's critical. 2001 Damian was a cheerleader who showed people that Perl is still a vibrant fun language. Latin, Klingon, Quantum::Superpositions, and SelfGOL are all part of that.

      In 2002, Damian's two main tasks are to back up Larry in the development of Perl 6 (and make no bones that we would not have the Apocalypses we have today without Damian's hard and unsung work behind the scenes) and to produce Parse::FastDescent (which will make thousands of Perl programmers' lives easier and less prematurely-bald :-).

      I can't emphasize enough the "unsung" part. Damian is famous within the Perl community for his crazy modules and Vulcan nerve-pinch grasp of the language. But very few people know what he does to support Larry and perl6 development, because he has deliberately chosen to not publicise that work. Every Exegesis is priceless--in the development of the Exegesis Damian invariably finds omissions or contradictions in the Apocalypse, he gets clarifications on real world issues we didn't realize existed in the Apocalypse, and he helps translate the oft-heady Apocalypse into the real world pragmatic code that Perl programmers need.

      Damian's an integral part of perl 6. I couldn't stand back and let only one side of the story be told. We now return you to your regularly scheduled "me too" and "First post!" :-)

      --Nathan Torkington

      • Perhaps a project manager's perspective of his staff (especially staff so gregarious and careful to please his sponsors as Damian) is not the most unbiased either? :) It has been years since I was a grad student - but I never would have gone so far to call Damian disingenuous and certainly not greedy. Rather I would repeat that he is focused on himself. Whether that is to the detriment of Perl 6 not mine to state.

        I absolutely agree with the cheerleader aspect - but do not understand why Perl needs cheerleaders. Do we really need someone to show us Perl is still a vibrant and fun language? Please - we know that already! It is fun watching one of Damian's wonderful lectures - no one derives more pleasure from them then he does!! But so far I chose not to contribute a second time to a fund that sponsors him. I just do not believe we need someone doing 'that kind of stuff' for yet another year.

        The obvious counter argument is 'things are a changing in Perl - we need a cheerleader to support 6.' I do not accept this - everyone is waiting for Perl 6 with such baited breath we all smell like a tackle shop!!

        As far as all the unsung work Damian has done - clearly I cannot comment because it is deliberately unpublicized. It sounds like it is incredibly important to the delivery of 6. Why is it deliberately unpublicized? It does not sound like the Damian I know (and love) to do a bunch of valuable work and keep it to himself. If it really does exist, can it perhaps be publicized? If it were my tune (and probably the tunes of others) would change.

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