Issue #106 - 2013-08-05 - Perl is so difficult, it took Zhao Bowen a whole afternoon to learn it...

latest | archive | edited by Gabor Szabo
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Hi,

So Perl was mentioned in the Wired magazine. - If you find other mention of Perl, please let me know. You know, I like to collect them!

Enjoy!

Gabor Szabo


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Announcements

Carton 1.0 is released

by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa (MIYAGAWA)

Carton, another beautiful creation of Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, is a tool to bundle CPAN modules with your application. To make sure all the developers use the same version of the modules and that you can then release your application relying on a specific set of CPAN module/version pairs.

New Dancer 2 release: 0.07

by Sawyer X (XSAWYERX)

SawyerX, now reporting from Amsterdam, tells the short history of Dancer 2 releases. I don't think there is any information about Dancer 2 on the main Perl Dancer web site, so I am happy to see that it is being developed, and that new releases appear. At this point it is still unclear to me who is using Dancer 2, and whether there is a clear upgrade path from Dancer 1 to Dancer 2.


Articles

Why I use cpanfile (and you should too)

by Mark Allen (MALLEN)

cpanfile allows you to describe the list of dependencies your module/application has and installing them using cpanm, without creating a CPAN distribution. This can be useful for new developers on GitHub, or inside corporations. See how Mark Allen explains it and then read the comments, including the ones from Miyagawa, who created the cpanfile format.

Technical Debt Strategies

by Buddy Burden (BAREFOOT)

I found this article of Buddy Burden to be very good. It describes what is technical debt, why is it called that way, and how to handle it. He shows 4 methods for you to implement.

A Marpa-powered C parser

by Jeffrey Kegler (JKEGL)

With all the text processing capabilities of Perl, I am surprised there are no parsers for all the major languages and grammars written in Perl. Maybe Marpa will change this starting with MarpaX::Languages::C::AST released by Jean-Damien Durand.

Mapping the MOP to Moose

This is the log of Stevan Little as he is thinking about the implementation of MOP in core perl. Especially discussion on how attributes can be lazy in Moose and in the perl5-MOP. I can take away two things from this post. 1) The perl5-MOP implementation is progressing, and we might have a built-in MOP in the next major release of Perl. 2) The whole discussion is way over the top of my head. I am glad some people can think through it.


Testing

Misconceptions & Misunderstandings

by Barbie (BARBIE)

What is the difference between CPANTS and CPAN Testers? Who are the CPAN Testers? Why do they report failures? A few weeks ago there was a post complaining about the CPAN Testers (I did not link to it as I don't like posts attacking other people.) Now Barbie, the main person behind the CPAN Testers explains everything you might want to know about CPAN Testers! Well, almost.


Code

A Look at Finding Out-of-Date Files

Shawn H Corey provides the script and explains the parts of it.


Fun

Three weeks of public talks coming up

by Damian Conway (DCONWAY)

Damian Conway is touring North America. You might still catch him talking in Toronto or New York.

UAV::Pilot v0.5 Released, Now Supports Real Time Video

by Timm Murray (TMURRAY)

Would you like to spy on your neighbor? Now you can do that with your on drone controlled by Perl. Timm Murray continues his effort to connect Perl to the Parrot AR Drone with great success and with video images.

Why Are Some People So Smart? The Answer Could Spawn a Generation of Superbabies

Perl was mentioned in this Wired article. It says: 'Perl is a famously complicated language that takes university students a full year to learn.' Apparently it is so difficult that it took a whole afternoon for Zhao Bowen to learn it....


Grants

Improving Perl 5: Grant Report for Month 19

The monthly report of Nicholas Clark. It seems Perl will no longer support PDP-11.

Improving Perl 5: Grant Report for Month 20

I am not sure why the title says 20 and the URL 18, but let's roll with it.


CPAN

CPAN candidates for adoption

by Neil Bowers (NEILB)

I wanted to do something like this for ages, I am glad Neil Bowers had the same idea and went for it. He created a metric that after some more tweaking will help identify which CPAN modules need some help, maybe even adoption. If you were wondering where could you contribute to Perl, look at the list and try to pick a module from there.

I've been patching Config::Tiny

Ron Savage already reacting to the above post of Neil Bowers is planning to become the maintainer of Config::Tiny. I am glad this is happening, and I am glad this is happening in public. I hope this will encourage you too to take action. BTW specifically with Config::Tiny, just a few days ago I bumped into one of its issues - not handling UTF-8 files correctly. As I needed a quick solution I created a locally patched version of the module. This works on the short-run, but having this fixed in the official version of Config::Tiny is much better in the long run.


Perl 6

Rakudo performance

In a nutshell: Rakudo-JVM was 40 times faster than Rakudo-Parrot. This sounds very exciting. I guess you can expect more announcements at YAPC::EU.


Other

Three month after domain name change

by Gabor Szabo (SZABGAB)

Once in a while I collect numbers from various sources trying to see how the Perl Maven site does and compare that with other Perl-related sites, and with sites related to PHP, Python and Ruby. It is unfortunate we don't have the visitor count of the major Perl community sites, but at least you might be able to interpolate from these numbers.


Weekly collections

Interview

Dave Miller, the leader of the Bugzilla project

Dave was lucky as a project leader: in the past couple of years he had two assistant project managers who basically ran the Bugzilla project while he only had to help out once in a while. Now that those two have moved on, he steps up his efforts again. In this interview you can hear about his work at the Mozilla Foundation and the challenges the Bugzilla project faces.

Perl Startups: Recollect.net

by Curtis 'Ovid' Poe (OVID)

Ovid continues his weekly interviews with Perl-based start-up companies. This week it was with Luke Closs, the CTO of recollect.net.


Perl Maven Tutorial

Always use strict!

There are 3 very good reasons to use strict. This article collected the articles explaining each one of the cases.

What is a text file and what is a binary file?

Not a Perl specific article, and you probably don't need the explanation, but it needs to be out there to be able to reference it.


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.

Beijing Perl Workshop

August 10, 2013, Beijing, China

YAPC::EU 2013

August 12-14, 2013, Kiev, Ukraine

YAPC::Asia Tokyo

September 19-21, 2013, Keio University Hiyoshi Campus, Tokyo, Japan



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