Craigslist Donates $100,000 To the Perl Foundation

mikejuk writes "The craigslist Charitable Fund has donated $100,000 to the Perl community for Perl5 maintenance and general use by the Perl Foundation. Craigslist gets more than 30 billion views per month and it is mostly written in Perl. The entire architecture of the system is open source — a proxy array based on Perl and memcache and a backend provided by Apache, memcache, MySQL and, of course, Perl. This is a successful enterprise giving something back to open source — which is how it should be."

Re:Good on them

[rudy_wayne]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7399720.stm [bbc.co.uk]

"EBay acquired a 28.4% stake when it bought shares from a former employee who had been given equity by Mr Newmark.
A year after the deal was completed, eBay, which had said it wanted to learn from Craigslist, started Kijiji.com, a rival international network of classified ad sites that now sells ads in all 50 US states. "

Re:Great!

[hlub]

Epic leaks? For the better part of a decade [perl.org]?

Re:Great!

[close_wait]

Its not a leak, Someone has already commented in the ticket that if you repeatedly create and destroy perl interpeters, then you need to set PL_destruct_level, because otherwise, (for efficiency), perl doesn't completely free the old interpreter, on the asumption that you're about to call exit(). So, it's just that no one got round to marking the ticket as rejected.

Re:Is PERL still active

[oneandoneis2]

Perl is *massively* active. The main "problem" with Perl is, unlike, say, PHP, you don't see it in action: A website that makes heavy use of PHP will have lots of .php files in its URLs. A website that runs on Perl will just use good old .html.

If you're looking for Perl by checking for "cgi-bin" then you're a long way out of date with where Perl is these days

Re:Good on them

[Stewie241]

But you missed the point. The idea is the ability to search through all the classified listings for items that are within 25 kilometres from my location. I don't want to have to look through 300 listings to find those items - I want search to work.

This probably isn't as necessary in smaller centres, but where I live, there is a wall of city for 100km. Craigslist breaks this up into small segments and you browse those segments.

Kijiji on the other hand, lets me pick a precise location and filter out ads that are inside a certain radius of it. This, IMO, is much friendlier to people in larger centres.

Re:Good on them

[drinkypoo]

There's another problem for people who live in bumfuck nowhere, which is my situation. Everything is far away from everything so I might as well look at ads in neighboring counties, and I'm going to have to if I want a reasonable chance of finding anything interesting. Now I have to visit various craigslists and manually repeat my searches again and again, or use one of the tools which are against the ToS. I understand that the stated intent is to encourage people to buy and sell in their area, but they really need to understand that doesn't make sense in all cases and make allowances for it. Besides, if I can't find it as near me as possible on CL I may well just end up buying something from much further away than necessary anyway, and what purpose does that serve?