Vienna.pm funds Jonathan Worthington to work on Rakudo Perl

At the Oslo QA Hackathon 2008, during one evening meal, it became evident that Jonathan Worthington would be able to spend even more time hacking on Rakudo Perl if he would get paid a little money for it. As Vienna.pm still has some money earmarked for Perl development, we encouraged Jonathan to send us a proposal for funding him. Which he did. And which we accepted.

So starting next week, Jonathan will work on Rakudo one full day a week (minimum of 8 hours of work), post about the work on the rakudo.org blog / use.perl.org. He will recieve € 150 per day spend working on Rakudo. We estimate that on average he will work 4 days per month. We agreed on funding three months (~ €1,800) and evalute the grant after that time. If everybody is happy, we will continue the grant until the end of 2008, where we will evaluate again (and check if we still have money left).

More info available in the WoC Wiki

Original: http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/23/2314234

Legacy comments

kaare: After lunch. (orignal post)

Oh, Jonathan will be very rich now. I guess he can retire when Perl 6 is ready*



But with this, and if Google SoC will deliver, it looks like we can have Perl 6 before Christmas after all**!



* Or when it's time for pensioning, whichever comes first.



** But still after lunch.

JonathanWorthington: Re: (orignal post)

Just because I'm going gray, doesn't mean I'm nearing retirement age. ;-) Then, that's probably not the point you were trying to make. Actually, I'm not sure what you are getting at. Financially, I could easily earn somewhat more doing other contracting work. Heck, I could go and work on something that bored me 9-5 and earn even more. Apart from I'd rather work on stuff that interests me, and getting Perl 6 implemented and deployed interests me. If it was getting rich that I was primarily interested in, I'd

kaare: Re: (orignal post)

Just trying to show gratitude to both Vienna.pm for sponsoring you and to you for accepting working for a lot less than standard rate, for the love of Perl 6.



Perhaps a bit of cynicism over the state of Perl 6 is mixed in, now after some 10 years since the process started, but I'm impressed with the latest development. A lot of good news coming out now in a still faster rate.

Alias: Re: (orignal post)

10? Didn't it start around 2001?

kaare: Re: (orignal post)

Well, I see now that it was introduced in the State of the Onion in 2000.



I was just sure that I had a conversation at that time that discussed if Perl 6 would be ready in 2002.



Perhaps I have to move that conversation forward two years.

JonathanWorthington: Re: (orignal post)

I can understand that it's easier to be a tad more optimistic now with the rate of news that is coming out, and I can appreciate that it's felt slow and why some people have become cynical about the project.



However, it's also important to realize the reason that things are moving at the rate they are now. It's not because something magic has just happened. It's because the years up to now have been spent working on the language specification and honing it so there's a good language to implement, and build

chromatic: Re: (orignal post)

But there's been plenty of years work going into the less sexy, less visible stuff that was needed to build it on top.

... and (to expand on Jonathan's very accurate comments) there's plenty of unsexy, invisible work remaining.

davegaramond: Yay (orignal post)

Although I'm not among the ones who donate/sponsor at the moment, I'm very happy about this. Jonathan has contributed a lot of Rakudo bits which we really appreciate. And looking at the WoC page, it seems that they haven't done a lot of sponsoring on real coding activities (not that the other activities like testing, documenting, etc are less important, of course).

jeremiah: Great idea! (orignal post)

I am proud to say I paid for the Vienna YAPC::EU in full, and am thrilled to hear that the Vienna.pm is contracting Jonathan to do this work! Great job!