Last night I stumbled on an article about Perl at Salon.com. This was quite an interesting article, I have to admit. I think it really summed up the attitudes and organisation of the massive Perl community.

The article tells how Yahoo's co-founder David Filo contacted Larry to thank him, saying that "Yahoo could never have been started without Perl". David Filo then offered Larry a chance to buy some Yahoo! stock at pre-IPO prices. Larry accepted the offer, and is using the proceeds from this lucrative investment to fund his daughter's college education.

You may not like Yahoo's search feature. I certainly don't, in fact, I consider it next to useless. Where I think Yahoo! excels is their simple design: only three images on the main page, and the site itself is great and easy to use. They are the best "news aggregator". For example, the BBC has its own news site at BBC News, but I prefer to read their news at Yahoo News as it's faster and simpler. I also like lots of their other services. David Filo sums of Perl pretty well:

"Because of the quick development time, you could do things really fast."

Perl's open distribution policy led to it be adopted by Yahoo! which really shows its power, flexibility and ease of use.

Perl has helped Yahoo! achieve great success, and this has improved Perl's visibility in the computing world. I definetly plan on giving back to the Perl community as much as possible, and if Perl is ever a significant factor in earning me millions, both Larry and PM will be getting a generous contribution.