Geizhals is a huge price comparison app in the german speaking market.
yup
Also, it’s very good at keeping tabs on the features of some products (best place I found to compare motherboards per features, something surprisingly difficult to do).
Unfortunately it’s very German centric and I live in Portugal, so I’ve only actually bought something from a link I’ve got there once.
I wrote Perl for many years while I worked on the godforsaken cmecf system.
Cmecf this year announced it had been hacked by Russian hackers.
This means that cmecf written in Perl allowed a country access to Federal Court evidence including intelligence gathering methods, corporate secrets, and inside sources.
Perl is not memory safe, loaded with security issues for over a decade. It’s only saving grace is string manipulation, which is exactly why the best hackers in the world all know it.
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!?
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.
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-$1000 a month is 'too expensive' for them.
It's extremely stable, installed almost everywhere, and has much fewer insane idosyncrasies than shell.
I can write some Perl and confidently hand it to a colleague where it will almost certainly work on their machine.
It's a shame it's so dead, for a scripting language there's nothing else that ticks the same boxes.
I would never write systems software with it, of course
Perl is straight up better. You need to remember one word: pie - for it's command line options, and now you can do:
```
echo "John Doe" > name.txt
perl -p -i -e 's/(?<first>\w+)\s+(?<last>\w+)/"$+{last}, $+{first}"/e' name.txt
# name.txt after the command: `Doe, John`
```
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.
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.
But … OSS is like a bellwether - the foundations of this great wealth need investment and maintenance else we build on rotting timbers.
And when a major global e-commerce platform chucks a few Weeks salary of a junior developer in SV and we call it worth mentioning, we need to find a new way to shore up those foundations.
I don’t have a good answer - I suspect I need to look deeper at the real problem - but it does seem to be a real problem
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.
Aldipower•1h ago
Asmod4n•1h ago
nik736•49m ago
pixelpoet•32m ago
sjn•15m ago
Asmod4n•15m ago
the_mitsuhiko•12m ago
Not sure if that's missing on the international site, but if you select "inkl. Versand" in the filter box then the sort includes shipping.
whiteboardr•1h ago
kiviuq•2m ago
Afaik, Heise Verlag is the owner of Geizhals