Issue #53 - 2012-07-30 - Is it reasonable to write new code in Perl right now?

latest | archive | edited by Gabor Szabo
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Hi,

It seems there were fewer posts this week than usual but OTOH it seems there are slightly more Perl 6 related posts. Of course I might be biased a bit, as recently I started to pay attention to Perl 6 again. Even writing articles.

I also released the first sell-able edition of the Advanced Perl Maven book (see below). I am planning to publish another two e-books in the near future and, then I think I am going to focus just on writing articles. Please bear with me. (I had to look that up, and there were some funny explanations on the differences between 'bear with me' and 'bare with me' :). See also 'beer with me'.

Back to the title story. Actually I think the usage of Perl won't grow much as long as our conversation can be described by that title. We need to change that question to:

'Is Perl the best choice for this project?'

What do you think? Please reply to this e-mail telling me what do you think!

Enjoy (and share!) the articles:

Gabor Szabo


Announcements

Announcing Catalyst Community Poll and Upcoming Town Hall

by John Napiorkowski (JJNAPIORK)

John Napiorkowski has published a 10-minute long survey about the Catalyst web framework. (It is less than 20 questions.) I don't see a dead-line so, I'd recommend you head over and fill it out ASAP, before it is closed.

Announcing the Advanced Perl Maven e-book

This is my second e-book. Based on the training material I am using and already including a few articles. Currently selling at 30% of its final price. It also includes a challenge to find your way how to buy it. If you get lost, let me know by e-mail, I'll help you through.


Articles

Manage your web app with commands

by Glen Hinkle (TEMPIRE)

Glen Hinkle tempi.re describes how to add commands to a Mojolicious application.

Perl bits: Passing @_ to a subroutine

by Sebastian Willing (SEWI)

Do you know what does &foo do? Asked and answered by Sebastian Willing

Some lessons in optimizing Org::Parser

by Steven Haryanto (SHARYANTO)

What do you do if your notebook is small and slow? Steven Haryanto had to profile his perl scripts to make them run at a reasonable speed. I liked the way the story is told.


Discussion

The Lost Secret of Mug-Driven Evolution

chromatic raised the question 'Is it reasonable to write new code in Perl right now?' and has discussed it a bit, thought the main point - something you might have heard earlier - is in the closing sentence: 'Build credible new things. Brag about them. Repeat.'. The comments section also contained a fair amount of good comments. For example the explanation of Ovid about the Osborne effect.

Is it reasonable to write new code in Perl right now?

Su-Shee took the question asked by chromatic and had a longish response why she, after checking out Java, Ruby and Python, thinks Perl is still the best choice for her company.


Code

List of Perl modules comparison articles

by Steven Haryanto (SHARYANTO)

In recent years there were several articles comparing modules for specific task. Steven Haryanto created a wiki page with the hope of linking to all such comparison articles.

An opensource startup on Perl 6 Pod

Zahatski Aliaksandr started to build a set of tools to write books in the Pod format of Perl 6 and process them with Perl 5. I am not sure how he is planning to earn money from this, but the idea of building open source tools in Perl and trying to make a living from that sounds interesting.


Grants

Alien::Base Perl Foundation Grant Report Month 5

by Joel Berger (JBERGER)

Joel Berger had made some progress on the Mac front and uploaded a few modules to CPAN to be test cases for Alien::Base.

Improving Perl 5: Grant Report for Month 10

Nicholas Clark writes about the investigation and fix of a potential security issue in all versions of perl 5. He also explains why this is probably did not add any extra vulnerability to code pointing out other security issues a programmer could introduce by using unverified user data.


Perl 6

How does interpolation of scalars, arrays and hashes work in Perl 6

On one hand Perl 6 only interpolates scalars and not arrays, on the other hand Perl 6 has a clean syntax to interpolate the results of any expression.

Making an IF game in August

by Carl Mäsak

If you were worried what will you do after Carl Masak finishes his month of blogging, don't worry. The Rakudo Death Star announced its plan to make a game in August.

Rakudo Star 2012.07 released

As usual, this includes both the Rakudo compiler, the Parrot Virtual Machine, a bunch of extra modules and documentation. In an announcement from today you can also learn about the binary distribution of Rakudo Start for Windows.

Rakudo QAST switch brings memory reductions

One of the issues I found when building Rakudo on a small virtual box was that it ran out of memory. (OK, I had only 512 Mb allocated. I had to add 1 Gb swap space to get compilation finish.) This change makes it much more likely that you'll be able to compile Rakudo even on machine with little memory. For example Nicholas Clark built Rakudo on Raspberry Pi.

Building and adventure game in Perl 6

by Carl Mäsak

Carl Masak almost finished his month of blogging. Check out the TOC with the links to all the posts.


Security

Weekly collections

Perl 5 Porters Weekly: July 16-July 22, 2012

Perl 5.17.2 is now available; Finally there is work being done for Perl on Android!


The self promotion section

How to change @INC to find Perl modules in non-standard locations

How can you use a module without installing it? This is a frequent question. In this article I gave 3 solutions for 3 different use-cases.


Events

I usually list the next 3-4 events here. The list of all the events can be found on the web site. If your Perl event is not listed there, please let me know.

YAPC::EU 2012

August 20-22, 2012, Frankfurt, Germany

Moving to Moose Hackathon

August 25-30, Preikestolen Mountain Lodge, near Stavanger, Norway

YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012

September 27-29, 2012, Tokyo, Japan

Italian Perl workshop

October 11-12, 2012, Bologna, Italy



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