Craigslist Donates $100,000 To the Perl Foundation 99
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
I think ebay has backed them financially (like own 25% of Craigslist), but otherwise have nothing to do with them. I suspect yahoo has plenty of Per and certainly lots of other tech, maybe they should match the donation :)
Great! (Score:2, Insightful)
Great! Now maybe the perl folks can afford to fix their epic memory leaks that have been their bug list for the better part of a decade.
Re:Kudos to Craigslist (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good on them (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I'm concerned, Craigslist is doing everything right compared to eBay. Site is simple, fast and easy to use. Craigslist doesn't try to take a cut from the little guy. They have enough oversight to keep it from becoming spammy and to avoid legal hassles, but otherwise leaves it up to the Users.
I agree with everything you said except for easy to use. It's technically true, but only because it doesn't do anything. There's no distance search, in fact, it is actively discouraged by carving the site up into small pieces and then disallowing scrapers, which exist anyway because they are an absolute necessity.
Re:They make that much $? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good on them (Score:0, Insightful)
absolute necessity? Some of us know how to read a fucking map, know where we live and work, and seem to do just fine using craigslist.
Re:Is PERL still active (Score:5, Insightful)
In its hay days during the Late 90's and Early 2000's there was a lot of PERL Development, but it seems it has dropped off and PERL lost its shine.
Frankly, Perl got it all more or less right already in early 2000s. So obviously there is not much development happening: Perl already works pretty well. Most new releases have mostly bug fixes - but also some minor syntax improvements and features from the Perl6.
IOW, Perl lost its shine only in the eyes of those who are after shiny. Perl is pretty down to earth tool to get the job done.
But back in the day every time you tried to find an open source program to do something it required PERL
Perl defines portability properly and allows one to access quite a lot of system-specific resources - in the system-specific way. Thus it was (and in some areas still is) quite popular as the language for install scripts of all sorts.
Even now, Perl remains one of the few power tools to be most commonly included in the fresh UNIX system installs (including Debian and Mac OS X). There is no other language/tool which is as stable and as portable: that's why it is possible and useful to include it into the OS install.
Not so much of this any more, is it because I have changed how I look for software or is it because PERL is no longer as popular as it was before.
IMO, Perl greatest weakness is the interface to other libraries (the PerlXS). It is not an easy task to make a Perl binding. It's fscking hard and includes lots of copy-paste. That's why Perl lacks many up-to-date bindings to many up-to-date libraries, what makes it not so suitable for many up-to-date tasks. Even Perl6 went on and pretty much excluded the XS/etc from the spec. What sucks and makes Perl6 worse (and useless to me) than the Perl5, because on top of general problem with bindings, Perl6 adds fragmentation: extensions written for different Perl6 implementation are incompatible with each other.
Re:Is PERL still active (Score:5, Insightful)
Even on scales of visibility [tiobe.com] Perl is still in the top 10 and pretty much stays about there for as long as I've checked the Tiobe Index.
Perl is like a shovel. There may be fancy post hole drills pneumatic jackhammers out there that get all the page views at Home Depot. But there will always be the shovel; because it gets the job done simply and have more uses than you think.
Re:Is PERL still active (Score:3, Insightful)
FWIW: Perl is the language, perl is a program that can run Perl. Case matters, and hence PERL is to me yelling.
And yes Perl is alive and kicking, I make a living with it.
As for lost its shine? You mean not everybody who "learned to code over the weekend" has moved to PHP or similar? I am glad for that.