Perl community has moved away from using special predefined Perl variables such as $(, $), $:, $!, $^H, $/ or many others without explicitly commenting their purpose. But why are we still using shift for sub params? i.e.:

sub foo {
    my $bar = shift;
}

Why is it still fine within the community to skip the @_ ? If we promote shift, then lets use pop as well? Why not? it looks nice:

sub foo {
    return pop, shift;
}

My focus is Perl used in web development. I am creating a "Perl Kata" (curriculum) for the CoderDojo project in an attempt to teach Perl the right way to younger programmers.

Well we started out today with a key-note (if a workshop has a keynote??) talk by Brian d Foy, you can see the slides here, and from the first few you will think it is just a blurb on regexs etc but fortunately Brian quickly left that rather overdone (and in my case dreaded) subject on how we can build up the Perl community. What it breaks down to is that you will never gain any notoriety out there re-doing what was already done you have to take on something that is either 'Boring', 'Tedious', or 'Hard' and hopefully stick with it until it is done.

The Talk as a whole was interesting and Brian did a very good job
on what needs to be done to fill the whitespace of Perl and if we do fill it up the community will be better of it.

I’m pleased to announce the release of USPS::RateRequest 0.0100. We’ve been developing this module in-house at The Game Crafter for a couple years now. It’s much faster than Business::Shipping, because it submits multiple simultaneous requests to USPS rather than doing them in series. And it’s more accurate than your typical request because it uses the result of Box::Calc to determine the exact dimensions and weight of each parcel. I hope by releasing this to the greater Perl community, you can enjoy on your online shops some of the benefits we have enjoyed by using this module. 

[From my blog.]

I'm about to present to the Swiss Perl Workshop this idea that David Farrell and I have been working on.

And, now it's published on PerlTricks.com

If you use DBIx::Class in a production setting and just happen to have a substantial test suite - this post is for you.

TL;DR: Recent development in DBIC required the introduction of a subsystem that turned out to be much more complex than initially envisioned. While it *seems* that all the kinks have been worked out, the failure modes are so un-graceful (dis-graceful?) that the latest trial is in need of extra testing before it can be deemed ready for production.

Therefore if you are in a position to validate that everything behaves as expected, without the risk of taking your production to the fjords (did I mention substantial test suites?) - please help those in less favorable situations and test the thing before it goes live.

You can install the trial by any of the following methods:

HARNESS_OPTIONS=j4 cpan R/RI/RIBASUSHI/DBIx-Class-0.082700_06.tar.gz
or
HARNESS_OPTIONS=j4 cpanm -v DBIx::Class@0.082700_06
or by grabbing the tarball and doing it old school
http://cpan.metacpan.org/authors/id/R/RI/RIBASUSHI/DBIx-Class-0.082700_06.tar.gz

While the current version is deemed safe, I am being extra cautious because of recent history. So what exactly happened (and what went wrong)?

As I talked during YAPC::EU with fellow Perl 6 fanboy mäsak about his (GOTO considered awesome) and mine (Perl 6 operators) recent talk I just summarized something I said and something he said and its just one little thought you might find nice too: Because normally as programmers we see it as as best practice from engineering point and so called best practices to have small manageable units (blocks, sub's classes,) and link them together as loosely as possible.

As we prepare to do a series of talks on Platform as a Service (PaaS) at the next MadMongers, I felt this article on Anti-Paterns for PaaS would be a nice share.

[From my blog.]

Yesterday I have written a post about searching a new sponsor for strawberry perl project.

And today I am pleased to announce that Enlightened Perl Organisation (EPO) has kindly provided our project with resources described in my previous post and is our new sponsor for the next 12 months. I would like to thank Mark Keating for arranging the funding.

If you are also considering supporting strawberry perl project you can still do it indirectly by becoming EPO member or via donating EPO.

I have a directory full of stuff that I've recorded off the radio. I'd like to listen to it on my phone on the way to work. And the most convenient way to do that is to create a podcast of that directory. That way, whenever I record more stuff, I just have to update the podcast and the files magically appear on my phone.

I am, of course, far too lazy to edit XML by hand, and I want something that will work in a terminal. I was surprised that I couldn't find anything like this. Well, I could. It was 1300 lines of PHP. I've not got anything against PHP, but 1300 lines of code for such a simple task? Really?

Here's my version. Tell it a source directory, a target directory, and the address of that directory in HTTP-land, and Bob's yer uncle.

SYNOPSIS

perl -d:Confess $( which dzil )  release

If you are using development tools like https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::Confess or https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::cst, and are trying to figure out how to use them with applications with a shebang like dzil, plackup, etc, the 'which' command is your friend. Invoking those scripts with perl should be effectively the same thing, and you can pass whatever switches you want to pass to perl.

See the comments for other ways to achieve the same thing.

If you visit the Github dashboard you will see two entries in the top left corners. Yours and Public with two numbers. These are the number of pull requests you created (Yours) that other people might merge and the Public is the number of pull requests created by others and waiting for you to handles. Please do so. Public 0 is the new Inbox 0.

One of the best ways to encourage people to contribute more is to respond to their contribution quickly. Merging is of course the best action, but even a comment on how the pull request might need to be improved is much better than silence.

First of all I would like to thank AuditSquare.com for sponsoring our project Strawberry Perl during the last 12 months.

The sponsorship comprised of providing the following VPS as our build machine:
- 3 CPU / 8 GB RAM / 120 GB HDD
- OS license - Windows 2012 Datac EN
- remote access: RDP + KVM
- unlimited Internet connectivity

Unfortunately arranged sponsorship period is over and we are looking for another sponsor willing to provide our project with similarly sized VPS (current provider charges approx. 600 USD per 1 Year).

For further information you can contact me via e-mail at kmx@cpan.org.

Since, I'm an extremely lazy person, so I'm not going to copy-paste-modify text of this post of mine, so please read it here, feel free to comment either here or here.

Thanks for your patience!

By now I'm sure that many of you have read about the research which claims that people aren't smart enough for Democracy to flourish. This was big news and made the rounds (including here on Reddit). The main researchers listed were Dunning and Kruger and I don't think anyone disputes their credentials.

Except that this is a science article, not a link to the actual research. In particular, I was intrigued by this by a reference to a software simulation validating their results. That piqued my curiosity.

[ Cross-posted by invitation from its home on the Ocean of Awareness blog. ]

Marpa has a new official public website, which Ron Savage has generously agreed to manage. For those who have not heard of it, Marpa is a parsing algorithm. It is new, but very much based on earlier work by Jay Earley, Joop Leo, John Aycock and R. Nigel Horspool. Marpa is intended to replace, and to go well beyond, recursive descent and the yacc family of parsers.

This is a followup from this post. You will want to read that first before continuing.

I just wanted to let everyone know that the British Library now has a means like the Library of Congress to link to specific books. This is called the “British National Bibliography” and is available at http://bnb.data.bl.uk. This should ease the problem of some books not being available from the Library of Congress. For instance, Bechbretha has a URL of http://bnb.data.bl.uk/id/resource/012025232. You can place extensions at the end to get various formats: for example http://bnb.data.bl.uk/id/resource/012025232.rdf will get you the RDF version of the document.

Things are now to the point where we can really drop most citation frameworks and go straight with something that looks like my citation proposal.

I often find myself going back-and-forth between POD pages of a single distribution. (e.g. Dancer and Dancer::Cookbook.

Is there a way to get all the PODs of a distribution as a single HTML page?

We are proud to make brian d foy's kickstarter campaign a success with a substantial contribution. After the Swiss Perl Workshop 2014 brian stays for another few days in Switzerland to work and teach his famous Mastering Perl course.

OETIKER+PARTNER AG is a Swiss IT company, operating at the nexus of software
development and system management. We heavily rely on open source tools in
our work and open source a lot of our products.
Our open source products include MRTG, the multi router traffic grapher, SmokePing to keep track of your network latency, extopus, a monitoring aggregator, and most recently, ZnapZend for high performance zfs backups.