
Why is Funding Perl Core Development So Difficult? - hendi_
http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2011/11/why-is-funding-perl-core-development-so-difficult.html
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astrodust
In part I think it's because Perl is done. It works. It's effective.

Extending Perl beyond what Perl is makes Perl something else. Perl 6 is barely
Perl in any classical sense.

The "Swiss Army Chainsaw" was never intended to be Java or C#. Its weaknesses,
a lack of formal typing, a small, simple set of core data structures, a terse
and convoluted syntax, are actually its strengths.

Just as C++ is not really C, and Java is certainly not C++, Perl would be
better suited by some kind of successor language that embodies the Perl spirit
without having to carry forward on the same code-base or concern itself with
legacy. I don't think Perl 6 is this thing.

~~~
njl
The successor to Perl is Ruby. System administration used to mean Perl, now it
means Ruby. Fast web development used to mean Perl, now it means Ruby or
Python. The successor to Perl is Ruby.

~~~
absconditus
I think that you are vastly overestimating Ruby's popularity outside of the HN
crowd.

~~~
hello_moto
I'm not into the whole sys-admin thing or the Ruby hotness or the Node.JS hype
but I noticed that there are more utilities or tools that are written in Ruby
lately.

CloudFoundry seems to be written in Ruby and it looks like a bunch of sys-
admin tools.

Chef, Puppet are both written in Ruby and utilized Ruby (or Ruby DSL?).

There's a strong push for Ruby lately and it might be because Ruby is kind of
similar to Perl so some sys-admins are okay with that?

------
phaylon
I hope somewhere in the future there will be a point where we can have
discussions about things like this without having some people think they can
just state "Perl is dead," "Python is the new Perl" or "Ruby is just better."
It's fine if that's your opinion, more power to you. But that simply doesn't
make it a fact.

The question of the value of technology is a very complicated one. And we'll
never be able to work out the good and bad points of the specific dynamic
languages, to cooperate and learn from each other, if all discussion gets
reduced to trying to make the others look worse. A witty saying never proved
anything. At least nothing valuable.

To me, in most cases the witty statements regarding languages (be it Perl 5/6,
PHP, Java, or anything else) don't demonstrate insight or experience, but
merely a lack of respect for other people's opinions. After all, "they" must
recognize that every large enough PHP program is unmaintainable garbage, since
"you" were able to recognize that. If they don't, they lack experience. If you
can't even imagine that the other party might have a point, you're not trying
to have a constructive discussion, but instead are in some kind of a fight for
the prize of being right. The problem is, there is no prize. There is no
right. Within this game, no-one wins.

To sum up: Less emotion, less absolutism, more technology.

~~~
danssig
Substitute COBOL for Perl in your post and read it again. Do you still agree?

~~~
phaylon
Yes. I don't follow COBOL and can't judge it. If there is a modern COBOL, I
certainly won't judge it by the COBOL that existed in the 90s.

To throw the question back: Do you think Lisp is useless because it's old, or
do you think the Lisp of the 80s doesn't have that much to do with the Lisp of
2011, even if the syntax didn't change that much?

~~~
danssig
I think Lisp is still mostly the same as it was in the 80's and even before.
But Lisp was always incredibly powerful and _still_ has ideas that haven't
reach mainstream yet. Unlike Lisp and COBOL, Lisp still has a few more things
to teach us.

~~~
phaylon
If that's your opinion then I hope you're happy with it. I can only tell you
that I, my colleagues and many others find great use in Perl, find that it is
also very powerful, and continue to further the community, the ecosystem and
the core language in anyway we can or enjoy. It solves our problems and it
solves them better and better each year.

As I said above, it's about the value of the technology for you, your project
and your team. I can't judge what's of value to you, or why something is of
value to you. But you can't judge either why or what is valuable to me. We
have reasons to use Perl that aren't pure stubbornness.

Edit: Forgot about the Lisp part. I actually believe that in the world of
Lisp/Scheme there were many things that changed for the better, and it was
driven by developments such as Arc, Clojure, Racket, Guile and so on. There
are people that think every Lisp is unmaintainable, slow, outdated, has no
libraries, has no community, has an unsupporting community, and so on. And my
point is that the answer is always more complicated than just "they are right"
or "they are wrong."

------
DanielShir
Most of these points are definitely valid (kudos to ActiveState, yeah
parallelism could use a boost, and we're definitely no longer in Kansas when
it concerns perl 6).

However, I do agree with the notion that perl should just stay perl. Do we
really need opaque objects? hygenic macros?

The backer issue is relevant though. I always wondered if Objective-C would
have died off in a corner somewhere if not for the iPhone and Apple backing
it. Perhaps strong backing from a powerful modern company would do the trick.
I'd cast my vote for Amazon :)

~~~
phaylon
I'm not sure hygienic macros are gonna be that much of a top-seller in user
code, I agree. But there are situations where it would be very handy,
especially as library developer. Macros would for example make optimized code
generation a lot nicer.

I feel it's the same with the work towards a core MOP. It will be hard to
convince regular users why the new thing is better, but for people writing
extension, auto-documentation tools, or other introspective systems it'd be a
huge relief (at least to me). The difference I see is that instead of
extending OO in the sense of a framework on top (Object::Tiny,
Class::Accessor), you compose in behavioral extensions.

------
ezyang
There are two things here, one is lack of funding, and the other is lack of
technical talent working on the project. To a certain degree the former can
compensate for the latter, since if you're a company and you believe enough in
your language to think that investing staff hours in improving it is a net-win
for you, you'll do it. As it turns out, attracting and keeping technical
talent is hard.

~~~
erikpukinskis
There seems to be something to this. Google didn't hire a random hacker to
work on Python. Guido just couldn't not work on Python, and inevitably, if you
are that kind of hacker, there's a company somewhere who benefits massively
from having you in their office every day.

Who, besides Larry, can't drag themselves away from hacking on Perl? I'm
assuming those people are all employed. If not, we should get them a job!

~~~
draegtun
While they don't all work on the core, development on each perl release is
very healthy. From Perl 5.14.0 release delta:

 _Perl 5.14.0 represents one year of development since Perl 5.12.0 and
contains nearly 550,000 lines of changes across nearly 3,000 files from 150
authors and committers._

ref: <https://metacpan.org/module/perl5140delta>

And since the 5.14.0 release on 14th May this year development has continued
unabated:

    
    
      Current release (5.14)
    
        * 5.14.1 on 2011-06-17
        * 5.14.2 on 2011-09-26
    
      Patch old release (5.12)
    
        * 5.12.4 on 2011-06-20
    
      Development for next release (5.16)
    
        * 5.15.0 on 2011-06-20
        * 5.15.1 on 2011-07-20
        * 5.15.2 on 2011-08-21
        * 5.15.3 on 2011-09-21
        * 5.15.4 on 2011-10-20
    

ref: Above dates from MetaCPAN and excludes release candidates versions.

------
jorgecastillo
I am teaching myself C++ after this, I want to learn a scripting language. I
think I will go for Perl, I want something like Perl because I feel(I don't
know), that Perl will not be changing drastically in the following years, that
the current userbase and available OSS code is huge and that this will not
change any time soon. I also like OpenBSD and it has Perl by default. Anything
I should be aware of?

~~~
danssig
If you want a scripting language you'll save yourself a lot of pain by
starting with Python. It's also on OpenBSD isn't it? If not, I'm sure it's
trivial to install it there.

~~~
kemayo
That does run into his "will not be changing drastically in the following
years" criteria a bit, though.

He can either learn Python 2, in which case he'll have to adjust to Python 3
when it takes off... or he can learn Python 3 and not (yet) have widespread
library support.

Learning 2 and then moving to 3 whenever it takes off isn't really that much
work, but I can totally understand it having a chilling effect on prospective
learners.

~~~
cageface
Python 3 is hardly _drastically_ different from Python 2. The only real pain
point is library incompatibilities. Most of the big changes in Python 3 have
been backported to 2 now.

Perl is worth studying for any language afficionado but if a friend asked me
today which language to begin with I'd _strongly_ recommend Python over Perl.

------
mst
We got $30k donated in three days.

Not seeing the big disaster here.

~~~
chromatic
How much of your time does $30k buy? It's not enough to buy a single full-time
developer for a year in the US.

Is that level of funding sustainable?

------
bazquz
Someone is going to say -- "perl ? Does any one use it ? I had to maintain a
project in perl 6 years back and I absolutely hated it ..."

Disregard him. He sucks candy.

EDIT: The downvotes are acting a ( ) for all the candy suckers. Checkout their
useless profiles, and memorize their silly nick's.

ha ha !

~~~
dextorious
Yeah, but if you get one of those responses to every post about your
language/framework of choice, then maybe it's time to read the signs on the
wall.

~~~
cageface
Let's be honest, Python and Ruby have eaten Perl's lunch. All it's got left to
argue for it is CPAN. The first startup I worked for, in 1999, was built
entirely on Perl. At the time it was a good choice. It isn't now.

~~~
absconditus
Outside of the start-up world Perl is still heavily used and Ruby is probably
not quite as popular as you believe.

~~~
cageface
So why are none of the heavy users of Perl willing to stump up some cash to
fund its development?

~~~
Mithaldu
They actually do. Check the Perl Foundation website. :)

