

The Perl Foundation receives $200,000 donation in support of Perl 6 development - systems
http://www.perlfoundation.org/tpf_receives_large_donation_in_support_of_perl_6_development
Good news for Perl and "chapeau" for Firebird Management LLC.
======
jrockway
This is great to hear. Perl has been really hurting because none of the
important people are employed by big companies with lots of money to spend,
and none of the big Perl users really donate much money. That means Perl6 has
been strictly volunteer-only up until now. (There has been a bit of money, but
most people can't just take a month off from work and live on a grant.)

~~~
SwellJoe
It has felt kind of like the corporate support has waned a bit in recent
years...and some of it (like scientific computing, which was momentarily a
bright spot for commercial Perl) has gone elsewhere, like Python. I worked on
SciPy and for its corporate sponsors at Enthought for a couple of years, and
it was very interesting to note the difference between the two cultures and
where development was/is coming from. A very large percentage of Python
development, including development of the language itself, is happening within
the corporate world, while Perl is almost entirely volunteer driven.

I'm not sure the volunteer nature is entirely positive. Ruby, with the advent
of the extremely commercially oriented Ruby on Rails, saw tremendous growth in
a very short time. It takes a combination of forces to build products that are
beautiful inside and out, and even the best Perl projects only ever really get
the inner beauty going on. We've got more/better libraries than any other
language, and yet, folks think coding in PHP is easier. It's a strange
phenomenon.

I think what I'm trying to say is: The Perl community needs more great web
designers. Oh, wait...We're talking about money and Perl 6. Right. So, having
real money to get Perl 6 out the door faster is the definition of awesome.

Anyway, we're doing our part: We're sponsors of the upcoming YAPC, and plan to
crank up our involvement (both monetarily and codewise) in the community by an
order of magnitude over the next year.

------
greyman
This is great news, congrates to Perl6 community.

Another question is, whether Perl6 will really be able to take off on a larger
scale. I still have a feeling that it is coming a few years too late.

~~~
SwellJoe
A few years too late for what?

It's actually pretty well-timed, I think, though a couple of years head start
wouldn't have hurt. It's true that there are several Perlmongers who've jumped
ship for Ruby (and I don't blame them--I wouldn't hesitate to do a new project
in Ruby, as it's like Perl with all of the rusty nails polished away) or
Smalltalk or Haskell or whatever. But, I think the Parrot+Perl6 effort is
still interesting, and still quite viable.

The thing is, it's only been in the past two years that _anyone_ thought to
put dynamic languages onto a "generic" VM like CLR or JVM. Given that both
tend to fight dynamic language designers hardest on those features that make
them "dynamic", this new interest across the spectrum is a great place for
Perl6 and Parrot to grow up.

Here's the thing...The JVM is awesome as a platform for new languages because
of its huge library--one can build a new language from scratch while avoiding
the biggest burden developers using new languages face, which is a dearth of
libraries. That's the one redeeming thing about Java, is its incredibly huge
library.

But, here's the kicker: Perl has even broader library coverage than Java
(unbelievable as it may sound, if you're unfamiliar with CPAN--and it's
probably the _only_ language that has more/better library coverage than Java).
The moment Parrot becomes a viable target for production languages the folks
working on Jython, JRuby, Groovy, etc. are going to at least take a look at
it. And CPAN is going to lure some of them over. Not only is the library
broader and more diverse, it is also already designed to work with a dynamic
OO+functional hybrid language. Perl idioms are far closer to Python and Ruby
idioms than Java idioms, and so CPAN libraries will feel far more comfortable
and "native" to folks working with those languages than tying to Java
libraries ever will--no matter how hard the language designer tries to hide
the differences.

And, of course, Perl 6 has a lot of nice features, and the installed base of
Perl code is larger than Python and Ruby combined (though smaller than PHP),
and perhaps surprisingly, still growing at a rate of more lines of code per
year than either. (That said, I suspect Python will catch up eventually, if
the trend doesn't reverse, as its rate of growth is higher.)

~~~
greyman
Just to clarify: I meant a few years too late to be able to take off on a
larger scale (larger scale == to be at least as popular as Perl5 used to be).
Or in yet other words, the question remains if it will be as popular as Ruby
or Python, which I think are its main competitors.

~~~
SwellJoe
If it were as popular as Perl5 still is, it would be more popular than Python
or Ruby. One has to be careful about how much the hype surrounding a language
effects your view of its actual popularity.

But, you're right that a lot of new companies and projects are being started
on Python and Ruby that would have used Perl five years ago. The two languages
are also having more luck at stealing Java developers than Perl ever was.

