Issue #66 - 2012-10-29 - Happy Birthday CPAN!

latest | archive | edited by Gabor Szabo
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Hi,

I don't have anything to say today.

Enjoy!

Gabor Szabo


Announcements

The YAPC Europe Organizers Mailing List

This mailing list is primarily for people who organize Perl-related events (YAPCs, Workshops, hackathons) in Europe++, but I am sure they won't throw you out, if you are not (yet) an organizer or - and this is my hope - you are from some other area of the world. I was also invited and I saw some other people from the USA. So I hope that this *will* become the mailing list for all the Perl-event organizers.

'Essential Modern Perl' Track at Austrian Perl Workshop

by Thomas Klausner (DOMM)

On 17th November there will be a full track designated to people new to Perl including about 15 topics. 20 minutes each.

Happy Birthday, CPAN!

In case you missed it, The Perl NOC also celebrated the 17th birthday of CPAN.


Articles

Perl Moose and ->BUILDARGS

by John Napiorkowski (JJNAPIORK)

BUILDARGS allows pre-processing incoming initialization parameters. There are cases when this works well, but as John Napiorkowski shows, there are also cases when it leads to code that's hard to understand and maintain. He suggests a couple of other solutions. For example the factory design pattern or the builder design pattern.


Discussion

Why I Dislike Autodie

Laufeyjarson opened the Pandora box and described the two reasons against the use of autodie. It is an interesting discussion as in every Perl training class I have to explain the two different mind-sets of error reporting. The core perl-ish way in which errors are reported via a return value and the opposite - for which autodie is a great aid, that throws exceptions on every problem.

Why the Modern Perl Book Uses autodie

Responding to Laufeyjarson, chromatic explains why his book teaches autodie as the 'right way to write modern Perl code'. Unfortunately in most of the places I teach, people just need to maintain old code, usually running on Perl 5.8. Even though one could install autodie on 5.8, I doubt they will make any use of it.


Testing

Slow Tests are a Code Smell

I agree with chromatic that long-running tests are a problem though I don't think the limit is at 10 minutes. More like 5 seconds. If the test runs more than 5 seconds people get bored, find some other thing to do and it will take time till they come back to the code.

Tapper release 4.1 'Cagney & Lacey'

Tapper is the open source test infrastructure used by AMD's Operating System Research Center.

Background of Test::Pretty

by Tokuhiro Matsuno

Making the TAP output of Test::More prettier.


Releases

Code

Progress::Any

by Steven Haryanto (SHARYANTO)

Steven Haryanto describes how he separated the progress reporting from the normal logging mechanism he uses. The result is Progress::Any. So instead of a long and confusing output he had to manually look through, now he can easily see the encountered problems and the current status of a long-running script.


Fun

Map of CPAN - The Movie

by Grant McLean (GRANTM)

I don't know what this means, but it is fun to watch... Very dramatic.


Grants

Alien::Base Perl Foundation Grant Report Oct

by Joel Berger (JBERGER)

Joel Berger reports, that his project is almost finished. Alien::Base should help you build your own Alien::* package making it easy to install non-CPAN dependencies.


Perl 6

Rakudo Debugger Updates

by Jonathan Worthington (JONATHAN)

Jonathan Worthington shows off with his latest improvements on his Perl 6 debugger project. Attribute introspection, trace points, 'step over' and 'step out' added. Oh and you can now step through a Perl 5 regex as well.

Sweet ports

by Jonathan Worthington (JONATHAN)

The cooperation between Carl Mäsak, Jonathan Worthington, and a bottle of Porto, resulted in a port of JSON::Path to Perl 6.


Weekly collections

Past events

PtPW 2012 recorded in Video

by Alberto Simões (AMBS)

If you are interested in improving your Portuguese, there is a good opportunity for doing so with the presentation recorded at the Portuguese Perl Workshop.


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.

Austrian Perl Workshop

November 16-17, 2012, Vienna, Austria

London Perl Workshop (LPW)

November 24, 2012, London, UK

OSDC Australia

December 4-7, 2012, Sydney, Australia



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