Hacker News: smonff

New comment by smonff in "Show HN: Yoink – Spotify to lossless with full metadata, self-hostable, ad-free"

smonff — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:14:53 +0000

YouTube / Google too.

New comment by smonff in "Who are the companies that still use Perl in their back end?"

smonff — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:58:09 +0000

Perl is not trendy. Companies, even those that use it extensively never communicate about it and there are no publicly visible ads on job boards. Doesn’t mean that there’s not code to maintain and projects building up.

Personally I never had a Perl contract by searching for the companies. I identified as a Perl specialist on my LinkedIn profile and some people searching for help contacted me.

Recently I have been contacted by some headhunters for something about « defense » in UK but did not manage to know more about it. Also check « aviation in Brusells », or « billing, payment, finance » in France.

For public sector: EPFL (Lausanne science and technology university and labs) and Genève public judiciary system. May be in the process of rewriting to other languages, as booking.com does (Java notably). But there will be legacy code still.

Also, banks!

New comment by smonff in "Who are the companies that still use Perl in their back end?"

smonff — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:49:27 +0000

Maybe for web crawlers too.

New comment by smonff in "Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia"

smonff — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 10:56:54 +0000

Still active and relevant for some people from those communities, though. Without mentioning the historic value.

New comment by smonff in "Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia"

smonff — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 10:55:24 +0000

It’s not a kingdom, but a monestary, and that’s exactly what the WikiPedia article explained.

https://www.perlmonks.com/?node_id=3559

New comment by smonff in "Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia"

smonff — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 10:49:22 +0000

Google index is tailored for each individual. Persons with interest in breeding cats won’t be served Perl results.

If Google index becomes a criterion of notability, we are in a deep deep shit.

New comment by smonff in "Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia"

smonff — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 10:47:18 +0000

Some of the deleted pages never had the « sources missing » tag set for a significative time. It has been straight to deletion point.

Some pages that survived the deletion (e.g. TPRF) had the « missing sources » tag set since 15 years… What, I have to admit, can justify some action. But it was not the case for the PerlMonks and Perl Mongers pages: those just got deleted on an extremely short notice, making it impossible for the community to attempt any improvement.

New comment by smonff in "Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia"

smonff — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 10:40:34 +0000

I makes very hard to re-start a new article. Why start from scratch when we could re-use and improve the old article? This is discouraging.

I am moderately tech-savvy and had a WikiPedia account for years. But going into the deletion-review process WikiPedia bureaucracy is a lot of work. Pretty honestly I looked at the process and it looks so complicated that I think I would rather write a brand new article.

New comment by smonff in "Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia"

smonff — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 10:27:19 +0000

This « rule » is infuriating. Google searches are tailored to serve us content that might interest us. In this case, Google search first page returns plenty of notable results for me. Might not be the case for a person interested in geology and dogs, though.

How could such a biased thing be a valid WikiPedia criteria?

New comment by smonff in "DuckDuckGo Donates $25,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundation v2025"

smonff — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 06:44:08 +0000

What about maintaining the codebases that got written 25 years ago? Those still exist and needs care to stay operational. Sometimes there’s no point rewriting to the next trendy language, although it can be obligatory, if it’s impossible for the company to find skilled workers, because everybody moved to a different language ecosystem.

New comment by smonff in "Geizhals Preisvergleich Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation"

smonff — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:26:42 +0000

Relying on large donation sponsors make the situation unstable when loosing only one sponsor?

New comment by smonff in "Please don't force dark mode"

smonff — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 20:11:15 +0000

I hope Spotify UX teams reached this.

New comment by smonff in "A New Logo for Perl"

smonff — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 12:44:42 +0000

There are ways to enforce good practices and collective code style.

Take a look at perltidy and perlcritic.

New comment by smonff in "A New Logo for Perl"

smonff — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 20:02:53 +0000

I am one of the person who did the « heavy lifting » on this logo. One of the versions I contributed were actually inspired by the Clojure logo, so, I guess you are both right.

In this discarded version[1], the camel hump is used to create a « dune » in the background. I would have think it was the best, but we discarded it during the review sessions.

[1] https://github.com/metacpan/perl-assets/blob/main/experiment...

New comment by smonff in "Are Overemployed 'Ghost Engineers' Making Six Figures to Do Nothing?"

smonff — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 10:52:32 +0000

It’s interesting the study and toolkit is focusing on engineers. What about engineers management?

New comment by smonff in "The Perl and Raku Conference 2024 is looking for sponsors"

smonff — Fri, 17 May 2024 16:37:57 +0000

What band would it be ?

New comment by smonff in "Open Letter to Tim O’Reilly to Free the Perl Camel"

smonff — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 12:32:51 +0000

More thoughts about this, inspired by the ongoing talk https://dev.to/smonff/notes-about-the-ongoing-perl-logo-disc...

New comment by smonff in "Rust is a hard way to make a web API"

smonff — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 17:16:41 +0000

Inefficient for what? Are Perl regexps inefficient? No, they are the best. Isn't Python's Django efficient at producing full web applications in no-time with decent performances and that can be maintainable? Maybe you are speaking of the way jQuery don't work at managing the reactive interfaces of half of the websites since 2006?

Who spoke of efficiency. Everything is inefficient. Are cars efficient? No. You use less time at walking your way than using a car and working to pay your car. Plus they are dirty.

I have to admit that I forgot Java that have the most efficient object system in the world: btw I got trained on it and spent half of my career coding Java. I just tried to quote stuff I wasn't familiar with.

New comment by smonff in "Ask HN: Anyone else burnt out due to extended lockdown and work-from-home?"

smonff — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 17:02:02 +0000

After an intense period of work from november 2010 to mai 2011, I burned-out because staying at home, working all nighter, not seeing real people, having my desk twenty centimeters from bed, and everything. It was not even lockdown or curfews.

Lockdown is just yet another reason why you may burn out. Personally, I have social anxiety, so I didn't care much in the first time, but in fact, not seeing people is just awful.

New comment by smonff in "Rust is a hard way to make a web API"

smonff — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 12:39:50 +0000

Don't believe the hype. Rust and Go are nice, but 95% of the time you don't need those. Especially when I read about the fact that it is "developed by Google for their own needs", I mean, you surely not work for Google. Same with React: you are (maybe) not a Facebook engineer that must work on one of the most complex front end of the world.

Just use stuff that works, and that most people already know. Python, Perl, Ruby, jQuery, PHP, etc. Any of those have all the tools you need, proper documentation, millions of Stack Overflow discussions, and exceptional ecosystems and communities.

I am a Perl enthusiast since more than ten years. Personnal opinion, feel free to ignore it. It got the incredible [Mojolicious](https://mojolicious.org) framework that makes possible to deploy a full API through a oneliner. I know everybody hates Perl (especially for web development), but I am really tired of all the re-inventing the wheels.

I would never study another languages. I am forty. I am tired.