A guy called Ian Hague gave US$200,000 to The Perl Foundation to help the development of Perl 6.
Well, it didn’t make me weep like Misha or The Walkabouts. But i did shed a tear.
Maybe it’s a tax writeoff and maybe he could give the money to the victims of the bad weather in Burma.
But he gave it to one of the geekiest and weirdest causes possible—development of a programming that possibly no-one will ever use seriously. But it could also happen that it will be the best programming language ever. And for whatever reasons he gave his money to it. It is almost a religious story: At least three of the leading developers of Perl 6 have been struck by bad health problems. And then an angel came, so this undertaking won’t perish.
The world is not lost.
Aharoni in Unicode 