Geizhals Preisvergleich Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

> Geizhals is associated with the Heise Verlag

Afaik, Heise Verlag is the owner of Geizhals

Username checks out : )

They had some very recent UI overhauls, it looks more friendly now.

The Perl Foundation has a goal to get more smaller donations, rather than a few large ones and it seems like they've been doing okay lately.

You're probably correct that this could better be summed up later in the year as one single news item. In terms of getting publicity and attracting more donation, announcing and discussing each "small" donation might be better.

You might call that on brand given their name.

This is better than nothing at all?

I've seen many promising and still in use open source languages and projects that barely even get $500 a month in contributions.

Yet these projects have added value in the millions to startups that never give back to these projects because $500-$1000 a month is 'too expensive' for them.

My go-to use case for modern Perl is to be the default program instead of sed. Sed regex support is abysmal and the same command line flags behave differently between BSD (and macOS) and GNU versions, in particular the `-i` for doing replacements - the number one use case for the program. So, this means that many shell one-liners and small scripts don't really work the same way on macOS and on Linux, and it's pretty annoying.

Perl is straight up better. You need to remember one word: pie - for it's command line options, and now you can do:

    ```
    echo "John Doe" > name.txt
    perl -p -i -e 's/(?<first>\w+)\s+(?<last>\w+)/"$+{last}, $+{first}"/e' name.txt
    # name.txt after the command: `Doe, John`
    ```

First of all, it woks the same way across platforms.

Second, you get all sorts of goodies: named capture groups, lookahead and lookbehind matching, unicode, you can write multiline regexes using extended syntax if you do something complicated.

And finally, if your shell script needs some logic: functions, ifs, or loops, Perl is straight up better than Bash. Some of you will say "I'll do it in Python", and I agree. But if your script is mostly calling other tools like git, find, make, etc, then Perl like Bash can just call them in backticks instead of wrapping things into arrays and strings. It just reads better.

BTW Ruby can do it, too, so it's another good option.

>It's extremely stable, ... It's a shame it's so dead,

The former is the consequence of the later. Popularity kills stability. Perl is the ultimate sysadmin language because it's so portable and never changes. We really lucked out with the Raku thing driving people away to python. Because of it my perl scripts I wrote in 2003 run on perl system interpreter today and the vast majority of my perl written today would run on a 2006 perl interpreter (some functions missing in some libs in troublemakers like Gtk bindings, etc), but it's generally very good.

These days with python you can't even run any random script written today on your system python from today. You have to set up an entire separate python for every script. And don't even think about trying to run a python script from 2006. That's what popularity does: fracture.

See also the little-known website Booking.com

The model we have works for used packages. If a package is used by a large company and requires maintenance, the company pays its engineers to do it, and the rest of us receive the updates for free due to the license.

However, the system breaks down for packages that are not used by major companies (or are stable and safe enough to avoid triggering an alarm).

There is no viable way to fund continuous support for every forgotten open-source project.

On the flip side, freedom is related to independence. If a company would heavily fund the Perl society or another FOSS, it would become dependent and loosing it's freedom. Freedom is something you cannot count or measure with capitalist thinking, but it does not mean there is no value to it.

The name is really horrible. Insanely ugly German word. Guess, one has to choose between Goethe or Perl docs.

Was the bug in Perl or its libraries, or in the code written in Perl? There are many valid criticisms of Perl, but I've never heard of the language itself described as insecure, and especially not memory-unsafe. I don't know how I'd write a use-after-free or stack smash in Perl if I were forced to.

Perl is not memory safe? Are there pointers directly to memory like in C? No, it is an interpreted language that runs opcode in the Perl virtual machine.

Sure, there are quite some safety concerns with Perl, but they can be mitigated. For example there is the taint mode with "-T" that prevents direct execution of system commands.

Would I use Perl for a new project? No. :-)

I would be interested in more details about the cmecf hack!?