Grinnz

Recent Actions

• Commented on Perl 7 By Default
  That is the very change in interpreter defaults this post is discussing....
• Posted Perl 7 By Default to Grinnz

  Perl 7 has been announced as the next direction of Perl development. My previous blog post explored at a high level the risks and benefits of…

• Posted Perl 7: A Risk-Benefit Analysis to Grinnz

  At the recent Conference in the Cloud for Perl and Raku, Sawyer X (the pumpking of Perl) announced an ambitious plan for Perl 7. Since Perl 6 was renamed to Raku to better…

• Commented on Preallocating scalars
  You may also find the utility functions in FFI::Platypus::Memory and FFI::Platypus::Buffer interesting, though those are really for dealing with opaque pointers to strings when FFI::Platypus's standard C-to-Perl string conversion isn't sufficient....
• Commented on A Date with CPAN, Update #3: Golden Jubilee
  A variant similar to what you added is coming to a future version of Time::Local. PR#15 (links cause comments to be invisibly held for approval)...
• Commented on Are array and hash representations really needed in subroutine signatures?
  Yes. These do not represent just arrays and hashes, but "slurpy" parameters. This is the way to indicate that you want to accept any number (or zero) additional parameters. Hashes are a way to accept the extremely common named parameter...
• Commented on Can't post a comment here -- dunno why
  I pre-emptively sign out and back in before any attempt to post a comment, and separately before any attempt to post an article (these sections of the site appear to maintain separate logins)....
• Commented on Why is the specification of subroutine signatures so complicated?
  Because there are many different ideas, and thus expectations, of what features signatures need to have, else we risk simply changing the "Perl doesn't have signatures" criticism to "Perl's signatures are useless" when we don't fulfill someone's needs....
• Commented on What is the value that Perl offers?
  I agree Perl needs to carve its own path, but I disagree that we should blindly hold on to how things work. SUPER and bless don't need to go away, but we would be remiss to not consider adding more...
• Commented on Request for Feedback: Perl Documentation Site
  Gathering more data in a scientific manner is a good idea, but tangential to what we're trying to find out here. Data won't explain what people like or don't like about the style of the site, or what they wish...
• Commented on Request for Feedback: Perl Documentation Site
  My goal was primarily to resolve or avoid the issues brought up in the GitHub issue tracker (both the old and new ones). Beyond that, it is just personal preference, so we want to know what your (collectively) preferences are....
• Posted Request for Feedback: Perl Documentation Site to Grinnz

  The official Perl documentation site at https://perldoc.perl.org was recently overhauled. Independently, I put together a reimagined documentation site that would be hosted at https://perldoc.pl. In the interest of providing…

• Commented on Why forward compatibility is important when trying to add a new grammar to Perl
  This is not exactly what forward compatibility means. It means designing the system to recognize features that it does not implement, so it still works as well as it used to, but it does not mean that the new features...
• Posted Task::Kensho needs your help! to Grinnz

  CPAN is wonderful and it is vast. Task::Kensho offers a curated look at the best it has to offer for those who don't know what to look for. But to remain useful, it must keep up with the trends of CPAN and the community. Thus, the community's…

• Commented on The Time::Local Trap
  Indeed, that is why the mentioned workaround works - in the heuristic, years less than 0 are always interpreted as the offset from 1900, and years greater than 999 (which a positive number + 1900 will be) are interpreted as...
• Commented on Perl Weekly Challenge 017: Ackermann Function and URL Parsing
  You might check out URI::Nested to deal with subschemes....
• Posted The Time::Local Trap to Grinnz

  The localtime and gmtime built-in functions are interfaces to the POSIX functions for turning a Unix epoch timestamp into date-time components in either UTC or the system local time. When you…

• Commented on Up, up and Away!
  I don't think that it will make a huge difference, but if performance is a concern you should never "use bigint", always construct Math::BigInt objects yourself when needed....
• Commented on TPF: Perl deserves better. Please do better.
  Have you considered that you are the one blowing things out of proportion here?...
• Commented on TPF: Perl deserves better. Please do better.
  You assume the involved parties are the referenced person and the people who were in the room at the time. In fact, this reflects on the Perl conferences and community as a whole to anyone who is made to feel...
• Commented on TPF: Perl deserves better. Please do better.
  You have fundamentally missed the point of any of this if you think his comment or intention is "grievance-mongering"....
• Commented on Why Perl 5 benefits is never talked in Perl Weekly Challenge?
  Yes of course; my use of the word "appropriate" referred specifically to the effectiveness of the medium for that format, and what mediums expect such a format....
• Commented on Why Perl 5 benefits is never talked in Perl Weekly Challenge?
  blogs.perl.org may not be the most appropriate venue for conversations or questions like this. The perl subreddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/ or Twitter might be better places....
• Commented on Searching Perldocs
  I have not. It could certainly be added as another backend to try. I would be curious how it compares in features and performance....
• Posted Searching Perldocs to Grinnz

  Search is a hard problem. It is the task of getting users to what they want to find, even if they don't know exactly what that is. Its requirements vary widely based on the kinds of things people will want to find and the kinds of people that want to find them. It's also an expected feature of…

• Commented on I want to display NA instead of UNKKONW in CPAN Testers
  Only this exact message is recognized as NA. die "OS unsupported\n" Arbitrary error messages will result in UNKNOWN....
• Posted Perl Toolchain Summit 2019 - CPAN Dependencies Graph to Grinnz

  I was grateful to attend for the first time the Perl Toolchain Summit, held this year in Marlow, UK at the Bisham Abbey. I got to meet many of the talented and persistent contributors to the Perl CPAN infrastructure, and also see a country outside North America for the first time. The Perl…

• Commented on How to serve Static HTML file and CGI script in development environment
  The Mojolicious plugin can coexist with anything else your application serves such as static files. The Plack apps can be combined with the mount keyword from Plack::Builder, with something like Plack::App::Directory for serving static files, or a Dancer2 application, etc....
• Commented on Call for volunteers to update OWASP Perl Wiki
  Surely Perl 6 should get its own page rather than confusing the Perl page....
• Commented on How to serve Static HTML file and CGI script in development environment
  And there are more options via Plack: Plack::App::CGIBin and Plack::App::WrapCGI....

Comment Threads

• Tom Metro commented on A Date with CPAN, Update #3: Golden Jubilee

  >hardcoding test results has other problems

  We always coach developers to use hard coded test data to the extent practical. When writing tests you have to unlearn a lot of DRY principles. We tolerate a lot more repetition, and factor it out sparingly.

  There are two main reasons why you do this:
  1. Any bit of clever calculation in your test could could be wrong. Hard coded values are easy to hand verify.
  2. Your test should read like an example of how to use your API, and having lots of layers of indirection and data generators makes the code less readable.
  …

• Buddy Burden commented on A Date with CPAN, Update #3: Golden Jubilee

  > A variant similar to what you added is coming to a future version of Time::Local. PR#15

  It looks like it's there already! I'm looking forward to converting over to using these new functions: timegm_posix and timelocal_posix. Should make my job much easier. :-)

• Buddy Burden commented on A Date with CPAN, Update #3: Golden Jubilee

  > We always coach developers to use hard coded test data to the extent practical. When writing tests you have to unlearn a lot of DRY principles. ...

  What you're suggesting can be good advice—I certainly agree that repeating yourself in unit tests is often preferable to being too clever in them, for instance—but I don't believe it is always good advice. Unfortunately, I think a proper response is beyond a comment here; perhaps I'll compose a larger blog post on this very topic in order to discuss the pros and cons.

  > Are you not able to explicitly set envir…

• Diab Jerius commented on Preallocating scalars

  And there's also Acme::SvGrow from back in the day, which uses either Data::Peek::DGrow, or the `push( '.' . $length)` approach.

• Peter Rabbitson commented on Perl 7 By Default

  I implore everyone to read this post, made just days after the one I am replying to. Among other things, the author who was quite *literally* there, discusses the "success" of the Python3 transition.