Craigslist used to donate over $100,000 every single year. Not sure when that stopped. That is really what kept perl going between the years of 2010 and 2016 or so. The board was actually paying a couple of people to do maintenance on the core repository and code. I believe they still do that but obviously due to deficits that is going to get difficult.<p>It's sad when so many companies are dependent upon perl, but donate nothing. A good case in point is AT&t in the 1980s was broken up into 20 plus different companies. They were then remerged back in the 1990s. But when they merged, they had 20 different computer systems and perl was actually used to glue all those systems together and handle data sanitation and ETL pipelines. Yet AT&t never donated anything to perl.
A: This is great! Perl is much maligned but a fantastic Swiss army chainsaw and still runs so much critical infrastructure.<p>B: I find it concerning that $25k is a notable donation; is the Foundation doing that poorly? I would have hoped this number to have two more digits in it for it to be a front page worthy item.
Relevant: Zerodha's Floss.fund is giving $1M this year for FOSS projects, and haven't got enough applications. Please apply and share: <a href="https://floss.fund/" rel="nofollow">https://floss.fund/</a><p>> FLOSS/fund is dedicated to supporting critical, impactful, and valuable Free/Libre and Open Source projects globally. We give up to $1 million per year to support developers and communities that create and maintain projects, big and small.
I always forget that DDG is written with Perl, even after I emailed yegg a million years ago asking why they used Perl, and he responded back, which was nice of him.<p>I hear Raku is fun, I haven't used it, but I sort of swore a soft oath that I would never touch Perl again about a decade ago after having to debug some regex magic someone did. I'm assuming that once you get past the "hump", Perl becomes fun?
This reminds me of Evan Czaplicki's great talk where he basically traces the funding of most modern programming languages to search engine revenues :-) <a href="https://youtu.be/XZ3w_jec1v8?si=zdL6v9P8LnT7Cbal" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/XZ3w_jec1v8?si=zdL6v9P8LnT7Cbal</a>
Wonders why raku is not really mentioned in the discussion?<p>Then I remembered my daily mantra:<p><pre><code> - NO_ONE cares about the community
- WHAT_THEY_NEED is UniCode & Rats
- WHAT_THEY_LIKE is poetry (not golfing, but an expressive professional medium not desecrated by ‘public void’ line noise)
- WHAT_THEY_KNOW is CPAN, DWIM and REGEX (the easy is easy and the hard is possible)
- WHAT_THEY_WANT is Grammar, Functional, OO, Declarative, Concurrency, Dynamic Type … oh and Procedural done v clean
- WHAT_THEY_HAVE is PHP, Ruby, Python, C#, Go, Perl5, ECMAScript, Java — demand for raku is pent up.
</code></pre>
So, I detect some natural frustration within and without the community. Keep the faith. We have a new audience, they value truth and beauty, and a story of battling the odds. They need this TECHNOLOGY. It is [perl6 | raku] – who cares. It may have to start in academia, it may have to start in the p5 stalwarts. It will ignite. Finish the journey. Do not deny your heritage.
OT: Craigslist is also built on Perl and hired Larry Wall (creator) years ago.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14345022">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14345022</a>
Another post in the thread mentions ATT; I can confirm that at another large telecom, Perl is still used in quite a few places, and is still being used for some new projects as well.
Good for them. They don't have to but they chose to.<p>What they have done (perform around 100M searches a day) is phenomenal. Testament to their marketing.<p>Unfortunately as a search engine, it's still just a skin of another one, with some additional small scale projects attached.<p>It's slightly surprising that DDG hasn't attempted to become a 'real' search engine, rather than being a meta. At the moment they make a subset of Bing's revenue per search, never mind what Google make.