Great to see they support and still use Perl. Geizhals is a very usable and functional product and price comparison page. Looks a little bit old, but that is exactly what I like. Geizhals is associated with the Heise Verlag, that is what I do not like so much, because there was a steady decline in quality in the recent years.

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.

Yes, I think this is a good thing. :-)

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

More friendly, less usable

Yeah I'm hugely frustrated by their recent updates that hide / obfuscate the filters, which is basically the main way you want to use the site. I'm pretty sure it's yet another casualty of optimising for phone normies :(

I agree! The filters made be go to the site, and I don't even live in any of the markets they serve! (Though I do visit, and sometimes buy tings based on what I've found through the site).

i just went back to check (i've already been there today) and there's an option "always show filters" in the upper right corner.

Good to know, thanks. I was looking for something like that but couldn't find it last time, maybe it's new?

Still makes about as much sense to me as Google adding a "always show search box" option that defaults to off :D

Hm, I only miss one thing, sorting by price with shipping cost. Can’t see anything else that was removed, just changed.

> Hm, I only miss one thing, sorting by price with shipping cost.

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.

still the best filters, i think. You can filter stuff so deeply, its crazy.

I've started learning (in 2025!) and using Perl lately as shell++

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

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.

I remember π and e and type

  perl -pi -e '...' file.txt

And if you are using a newer Perl they sometimes add features that aren't enabled by default unless you opt-in with a 'use v5.38' style declaration.

If you want those features on in your one-liner you can use -E instead of -e

    perl -pi -E '...' file.txt

(I used to need this long ago when I wanted to use the then-new "say" in my one-liners)

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.

Good old Java is also stable and yet popular. It is not particular "trendy", thought. My feeling is that languages which "live in"/"create" ecosystems such as JVM, BEAM or even LLVM have a better probability to outlive other languages in the long run. Let's see what happens with golang in some years... ;-)

Stable? Huh. Never thought of Java that way. Dead, yes, but it was never stable. In my experience I have to set up a custom JVM version for every java application I've come across. Is your experience different?

Dead? Really? It's one of the most popular computer languages. And it constantly evolves and becomes better over time.

For me, Java died with Oracle shenanigans. I moved to C#. Java isn't truly dead yet but I think it will slowly die off because of Oracle. Same as Solaris and SPARC, but a little slower.

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).

By far not. It's only more readable, but much more verbose, overarchitectured, slower and esp. unstable. Old perl scripts still work fine, old python scripts are not only many, many files, but also break every other year.

And you cannot just install a python module as you install a perl module. You need venv everything because it's soo fragile.

But this 10k sponsoring is not really worth mentioning. It's just like Platinum sponsorship for one of their conferences.

I check this site several times to get an idea what is the market price of something in the real world (i.e. outside Amazon).

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.

Why is this news? Because it's so little? 10K will pay a developer for 2 months maybe ..

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.

I was impressed to see at the new keynote that Blender is successfully shifting its revenue growth to small donations. So it can be done.

This is also true for KDE e.V., where we've evolved from a roughly 50:50 split between corporate and individual donations to now about 75% of the donations (which have overall increased multi-fold) coming from individuals, many of whom are on recurring plans.

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).

iirc, large parts of Proxmox VE is still also written in Perl

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.

It's the German word for "scrooge", for those wondering.

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?

did not know (or forgot) that they were using Perl

Geizhals is a huge price comparison app in the german speaking market.

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

booking uses Perl? that's one of the web sites that gives me the irrational "the backend must be Java" feeling. can't explain why though.

Got curious. Seems like they have been a heavy Perl shop from the beginning.

Their backend developer job ads appear to be oddly programming language neutral which I assume means they're still using Perl a lot. (Been there, done that, when recruiting for work in an unusual programming language.)

I don't think they're comparable... I read stories on how a paid reservation at Booking.com isn't a guaranteed stay at a hotel. Geizhals gives you the stock and availability infos right on the results page. Seems like one is making better use of Perl that the other.

UK link: https://skinflint.co.uk

Geizhals is powering heise compilate, the affiliate/revenue generating platform for the heise publishing house. Basically, it allows you to add prices for products or categories to websites, competing with the "shop this on amazon" affiliate links if websites want to give customers different options than amazon.

Link in German: https://compaliate.heise.de/

"Geizhals Preisvergleich began in July of 1997 as a hobby project—and yes, “Geizhals” literally translates to “skinflint” in English"

yup

For me as a german speaker it is kind of humoruous that they called it that way. I guess similar to Yahoo for english speakers.

Anyway, I'm still using that site for my electronic purchases. It reminds me of a past, more likable internet (before social media).

I'm not a native speaker but I like the name.

The domain was a gift by the founders of inode (former Austrian ISP) and the website grew pretty fast after the brand change in 1999.

But it curiously turned out that while Austrians mostly like the name (notable exeptions were delusional marketing people of "premium brands" considering advertising on the site), Germans are really not so fond of it. Cultural differences, I suppose.

I think it mostly hasn’t aged well. Idk, seems like a relict of an era when people couldn’t have foreseen how language and the internet have evolved. This kind if vulgarity was en vogue in marketing once, kinda boomer stuff.

Also, I wasn’t aware it's Austrian, or I wouldn’t have made the Goethe remark. Thanks for the background info!

Geizhals is a great example of a sustainable business, working for almost three decades to improve their product and give users what they want.

Glad to see them giving back to the community and hoping that they remain in this marker so Idealo has some competition.

There is a problem somewhere deep in capitalist economies. The model has served humanity well - from Napoleon to Neo-Liberal the world has seen vaccines, space flight, farming revolutions and sewage plants giving longer better life to billions.

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

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

You must have confused Perl with another programming language. Perl has always been a memory-managed language with a reference-counted garbage collector.

The link you posted doesn't even mention Perl at all. It does say that:

Using a memory safe language can help prevent programmers from introducing certain types of memory-related issues. Memory is managed automatically as part of the computer language; it does not rely on the programmer adding code to implement memory protections.

Perl clearly fits the definition of a memory-safe language with automatic memory management. The funny thing is that this document lists Delphi/Object Pascal as memory-safe languages, even though there are clearly not.

It’s not mentioned because it isn’t one ;)

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.

Yep, there are bad bugs for example in mod_perl which is written in C and takes the interpreted Perl code and runs it in the Apache context. I think this is what the OP "heard about". But that is not the fault of Perl itself.