DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation
DuckDuckGo’s $25,000 donation to the Perl and Raku Foundation has revived debate over the health and future of Perl, a language that once powered much of the web and still underpins critical but often invisible infrastructure. Commenters note that the foundation’s finances are precarious and see the donation as both welcome and surprisingly small given how many companies still rely on Perl without contributing back. The thread broadens into questions about the sustainability of open source funding models, the trade-offs between powerful but hard-to-read languages like Perl and more standardized ones like Python, and whether newer offshoots such as Raku can ever gain mainstream traction.
Reaction to DDG’s $25k Donation
- Many see the donation as a positive, pragmatic move by a Perl-using company.
- Some are surprised $25k is “newsworthy,” expecting another one or two zeros if the ecosystem were healthy.
- Others note that for a single company, $25k is reasonable and that the real issue is many Perl-dependent companies giving nothing.
Perl & Raku Foundation Finances
- Linked financials suggest the foundation is in a rough spot: recurring deficits, unclear plan to stop them.
- Questions raised about why grant spending rose while revenue fell.
- Governance and transparency are criticized; internal financial monitoring and reporting have historically been weak.
Open Source Funding Models
- Repeated theme: corporate sponsorship is weak relative to how much value OSS creates.
- Debate over whether OSS should continue to rely on volunteer labor vs. charging users.
- Some argue corporations owe nothing; others frame non-funding as short-sighted risk to critical dependencies.
- Ideas floated: government grant programs funded via tax, better donation UX, dual licensing, and grant funds like floss.fund.
- Strong disagreement over whether “open source is a business model” vs. a public-good ideal.
Current Use and Status of Perl
- Perl usage is perceived as declining, but many report it still runs significant infrastructure: search engines, classifieds, telecoms, EDA workflows, financial firms, Linux tooling, Japanese BBSs.
- Some companies freeze existing Perl systems and rewrite any new work in other languages; others still start new Perl projects, especially for scripting and ETL.
- Perl’s long-term backwards compatibility is seen as a key reason old code keeps running with minimal maintenance.
Merits and Drawbacks of Perl
- Fans praise its power, expressiveness, regex integration, layering of features, and CPAN.
- Critics call it a “write-only,” overly clever language, problematic for team readability and maintainability.
- Comparisons made with Python: Python is seen as more bloated, more breaking changes; Perl code often still just works.
- Cultural issues like “there’s more than one way to do it” are cited as both strength and liability.
Raku’s Position
- Raku is regarded by some as a powerful, elegant successor (new regex model, grammars, multiple paradigms) but hampered by performance and lack of ubiquity.
- Frustration that Raku is rarely mentioned; belief that demand is “pent up” but overshadowed by Python, Ruby, etc.
- Question raised whether Raku can ever achieve Perl’s depth of documentation and ecosystem.