Geizhals Preisvergleich Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation (opens in new tab)

Username checks out : )

> Geizhals is associated with the Heise Verlag

Afaik, Heise Verlag is the owner of Geizhals

Haters will say a major factor in still using Perl is the difficulty to replace up to 25+ years old Perl code written at startup pace AND the difficulty to teach old Perl devs a new language.

UI-wise it reminds me of Craigslist.

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

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.

At my work we use perl extensively for utility scripts and such. In the past few years there has been a push to write new scripts in python, but I don't really see the point. It has most of the same drawbacks that perl has: 30x slower than a compiled language and dynamic typing.

We have many scripts that range from 5.8 to 5.36 and everything in between. 5.8 is 20 years old. Someone did a search & replace on the shebang lines to move all the older ones to 5.20 (why they picked that one, I don't know) and everything just continued to work.

I prefer perl over python. turn on use strict, use warnings FATAL => 'all' and use modern function signatures. Perl is still great for its purpose.

>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.

It's stable, installed everywhere, and I use programs written in Perl like when building Linux From Scratch. I haven't written in Perl since the 1990s. I do read code written in Perl and Raku, and I am often impressed by how succinct the code can be.

> for a scripting language there's nothing else that ticks the same boxes

I think Python ticks almost all the same boxes (and is much better designed in my opinion).

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.

99% of companies don’t donate anything, lets not criticize the few that do.

I only knew of one company with some kind of techie fandom primarily using Perl before reading this (Fastmail out of Melbourne, Australia). Now I know of two.

Still, two is a small number. And we're probably talking about like 20 Perl developers in total across these two companies (just having looked at their total employee counts).

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.

You might call that on brand given their name.

I don't think that will even qualify as a tax deduction in the US for most engineers with 2026 rules. (this is not tax advice)

Relying on large donation sponsors make the situation unstable when loosing only one sponsor?

And according to "DuckDuckGo Hiring" page, the DuckDuckGo search engine still uses Perl 5 in their backend.

See also the little-known website Booking.com

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

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.

> Perl is not memory safe

Perl is memory safe.

> loaded with security issues for over a decade.

According to CVE reports, it doesn't appear that Perl [0] is less secure than Python [1]:

[0]: https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/1885/Perl.html

[1]: https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/10210/Python.html

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!?

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.