Delon Newman

• Website: delonnewman.name

Recent Actions

• Commented on $3M says Perl5 needs a new major version number
  Correction, evidently PDL is on Github, but I think the rest would apply....
• Commented on $3M says Perl5 needs a new major version number
  Visibility is needed, get PDL on GitHub, blog about PDL with Hadoop, and R, and other "hot" data science / data analysis tech, and post it on Hacker News. There's evidently still enough interest in Perl to get an article...

Comment Threads

• Ron Savage commented on $3M says Perl5 needs a new major version number

  Hi

  Write an article comparing your plotting package with the others. A bit of work? Undoubtedly. And yours does not have to surpass the others in all ways. The point is to give you something to brag about.
  

• Steffen Mueller commented on $3M says Perl5 needs a new major version number

  John, 1M$ is not very useful even if you manage to raise it. Having a plan for how you're going to spend it well is what gives the value.

  In other words: 1M$ is a lot of money for just the pure benefit marketing in the sense of saying "look, we could raise a ton of money".

  Come up with a plan that benefits people, and you can find money to fund it. TPF didn't have to bend over backwards to raise a quarter of a million for the core maintenance fund.

• David Mertens commented on $3M says Perl5 needs a new major version number

  @Steffen, I can think of multiple projects for improving Perl's speed for data analysis. These include extensions and improvements to PDL as well as writing (finishing) Perl bindings for the Tiny C Compiler and pushing development on FFI::Raw. If I could get a full grant for doing this sort of work (i.e. something that paid a salary for multiple months) I would be absolutely delighted. However, I do not think these ideas are worth the small-dollar grants; I may as well do it out of my own intrinsic sense of motivation, which is what I have planned to do all along. Where would I begin such a…

• Steffen Mueller commented on $3M says Perl5 needs a new major version number

  @David: I've used PDL in the past, but am not a current user. It's a fine tool! I simply have no need for it.

  At work, Perl code uses the CPU time of millions and millions of EUR worth of hardware and spends most of its CPU time on general OO overhead such as method calls as well as string operations (lots of concatenation, lots of UTF8-related operations). It also spends lots of time on hash manipulation. Speeding up any of those generally would be worth real money for us. Another avenue that would be really rather useful is finding a more efficient way of calling from C back into P…

• Joel Berger commented on $3M says Perl5 needs a new major version number

  Knowing David as I do, I highly doubt that "simplistic" use cases are all he has in mind.