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Fastmail Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation
- toomuchtodo 7mo agoAs a Fastmail customer, I appreciate these sorts of efforts. Thanks Fastmail!
- adarsh2321 7mo ago[dead]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jsheard 7mo agoIt's not great to see LLM bots posting on HN, though.
- qingcharles 7mo agoI don't know what that post said, but that's the first time I've seen an account nuked so hard its username disappeared too.
- vidarh 7mo agoI have showdead on, and every comment the account has posted is "[superlative] post. [trivial observation]. Do you/Have you [superficial question]".
- scottchiefbaker 7mo agoLong live Perl... it's my favorite CLI scripting language.
- mariogreymist 7mo agothere are other good scripting languages but I know Perl so I've never really needed any of them
- lizknope 7mo agoSame here. I started learning in 1995. I've learned and use other languages but if I have a choice then I use Perl. Most stuff I need to do at work is either Tcl for EDA tools or text report processing where I use Perl
- schrectacular 7mo agoOriginally switched to fastmail in '03 or so because they used perl. Kinda sad they sunset my "lifetime" plan but _guess_ I understand.
- qingcharles 7mo agoBeen with them since '04. One of the very few companies where I have literally zero complaints. Still a shame they sunset your plan :(
- altairprime 7mo agoYeah, I was pretty sad about the end of the pobox lifetime discount, but I understand why.
- lp4v4n 7mo agoI started working in the 10's and I have never met a single developer who actively works with Perl. Sometimes I wonder whether Perl left a huge code base behind, like COBOL did, but I suspect it didn't, mostly due to the fact that Perl is a dynamically typed language used mainly for web development and sysadmin scripting. Perl unlike Java, which had no serious alternative in its niche, unfortunately has an uncertain future in my opinion. Not that Perl is going to disappear suddenly like coffee script, but as the old timers retire or pass away in the next decades, I can certainly see the language slowly "evaporating".
- doublerabbit 7mo agoPerl is being migrated to Python. Two of the big banks I know have been running LLM tooling to migrate from. My last job was for a fortune 10 bank. I personally learnt it at the age of 17 as the homemade switchboard for MSN Messenger bots were coded in it. I'm 36 now and still not letting go. Something about the syntax pleases my brain. I am currently learning Erlang.
- librasteve 7mo agothis
- markoman 7mo agoWere these (bank) applications focused on text-processing or web applications? If they were web applications, I assume they weren't CGIs...
- doublerabbit 7mo agoFor what I can expand upon, not web applications per-se. They displayed management pages accessible via browser for different departments to manage, resource management, statistics, estimated costs and calculations. The main usage were on back office tooling such as reporting back job queues, status of specific jobs, load balancing and the likes.
- qingcharles 7mo ago
- shrubble 7mo agoI’m aware of two large telecom companies that use Perl extensively, but in-house and internal services only. They don’t have anything “public” to point to. I will say that the extensive backwards compatibility is a big reason why Perl remains; there’s no pressure to change or get rid of “old” programs when they just keep working year and year.
- ifh-hn 7mo agoI've never used perl but use exiftool everyday. I was going to start using it on the cli, but then ended up learning powershell, and then moved to nushell. I don't see myself learning it now.