Supplier News

15 December 2008

Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Booking.com, Europe's largest and fastest growing online hotel reservation service, donated 50,000 US$ to The Perl Foundation ( ), to aid in the further development and maintenance of the Perl programming language in general, and Perl 5.10 in particular.

"As the programming language of choice at Booking.com, we want to give something back to the open source community of Perl developers which so generously provide us with the tools that allow us to make Booking.com the fastest growing online hotel reservation service in Europe", said Kees Koolen , CEO of Booking.com.

"Without Perl and its dedicated developers, Booking.com would not have had the flexibility and efficiency that was required to be able to grow as quickly as we have in the past 12 years.

It has allowed us to create an ever growing team of dedicated internal developers from all over the world, who are eager to keep learning and continue improving the online hotel reservation experience".

"We would like to express our gratitude to booking.com," said Richard Dice , President of The Perl Foundation. "The purpose of The Perl Foundation is to support the Perl programming language and the community that surrounds it.

This is only possible with help from other individuals and organizations who realize how remarkable Perl is and how we can all act together to continue improving it. With their gift, which is one of the largest The Perl Foundation has ever received, booking.com has demonstrated extraordinary vision and community spirit."

Last Thursday 11 December 2008, Larry Wall , founder of Perl, gave the keynote speech at the half-yearly internal Booking.com IT-conference, which was attended by the 50+ person IT team of Booking.com. Now working on Perl 6, the programming language for the next 30 years, Larry Wall has been co-responsible for the definition of this new version of the Perl language, of which multiple implementations, such as Rakudo () and Pugs (), already have become available for testing.

Since the foundation of Booking.com in 1996, apart from the Perl programming language, the company has always used open source projects, and products for its IT infrastructure such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and Java.

About Booking.com | Booking.com is part of Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN). Its website attracts an average of 30 million unique visitors each month. Booking.com works with more than 57,000 affiliated hotels in 15,000 destinations around the world. Its services are available in 21 languages. Booking.com currently has 24 offices in Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Cambridge, Cape Town, Dubai, Dublin, London, Loulé (Portugal), Lyon, Madrid, Moscow, Munich, New York, Orlando, Paris, Rome, San Francisco, Sydney, Singapore, Stockholm, Vienna and Warsaw.

About The Perl Foundation | The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code. The Perl Foundation coordinates the efforts of numerous grass-roots Perl-based groups, including: International Yet Another Perl Conferences (YAPC's), Carries the legal responsibility for Perl 5 and Perl 6 and the Artistic and Artistic 2.0 licenses, perl.org, Perl Mongers, and PerlMonks.