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Postings from May 2009
Nicholas Clark wrote: > Just an opinion based on general observation, so I can't honour any > [citation needed] requests, but: > > It feels like those times have passed, with respect to the perl core. As best > I can tell (this is without asking to confirm) the last person who had a large > amount of corporate leeway to work on things was Jarkko. Everyone since has > been doing it as a volunteer, possibly by volunteering *some* of work's time, > with the exception of the three months in 2006 that I had a TPF grant to work > on things, and currently with Dave being paid a mere $5000 to spend many weeks > on 5.10.1 (as yet unfinished, but it's still only $5000). > > I don't believe (and I'd welcome corrections) that any other work on the core > has been explicitly or implicitly funded by any organisation. It's notable > that booking.com's recent generosity took the form of a donation of money, > rather than time (They employ (at least) 3 people who have core commit access), > suggesting that these days companies, as well as individuals, are time poor > cash rich. > There are other ways to commit to the community. Reporting backs, helping users, using the software and getting enough experience to collaborative work towards improving design. "Volunteer" time is grey. I expect most enhancements to Perl have been raised by Perl being used in real projects, usually for companies. Perl is the "practical" language, as opposed to one of the either ivory tower languages. Not to suggest my own contributions have been high - but the reason I have hung around here for so many years, is because I use Perl every day in my job. Even on Java days, there is still at least one Perl command I run to do something. I get paid by my company to complete a job. I use Perl to do the job. I participate in the Perl community to keep in touch and contribute where I can. Indirectly, my company is funding my contributions to Perl. I think the success of Perl is primarily due to the millions of people in the same position as I am. I choose to use Perl for many tasks, simply because it's the best tool for the job. This ends up adding to the huge pile of existing production software that is written in Perl. For somebody to come along later and say "I don't care about protecting your investment..." is a real concern for me. If you review my posts over the last 2 decades or so - I haven't always been on the backwards compatibility police side of things. I don't expect the language to be static. But, I do expect the new generation of "contributors" to respect the investment made by the last generation. I put myself as a last generation contributor in that Perl is starting to age for me, and my choice of language for new projects is becoming less and less Perl. This doesn't change the millions of lines of Perl I've written in the past, much of which is still in production use, that I expect to keep on working without me baby sitting it. I've moved on to other projects. Cheers, mark -- Mark Mielke <mark@mielke.cc>Thread Previous | Thread Next