the Giant Planet of Perl

By C.-Y. Fung on April 19, 2020 5:10 PM

Finally I saw posts of PWC#056 on blogs.perl.org .

I haven't found what to discuss about #056 Task #1. Just to keep people know this code producer is alive and healthy, I share my recent life:

On Perl resources:

1. Perl Monks

From a blogpost^[1], I was hooked to https://www.perlmonks.com/ . Apart from many advanced Perl discussions, there is a book review section (not very active):

Book Reviews of Perl Monks

Yesterday I got the "Perl Debugged" and "Perl Best Practices" on my hand, which are both recommended for fresh-to-intermediate Perl programmers. Yeah!

( The Best Practices seems to be accepted as one of commons among Perl programmers. There is Perl::Critic (learnt from the PWC Champion Interview March 2020). And there is a reference sheet on the book. )

The monks also have a tutorial section:

Tutorials of Perl Monks

2. Perl Weekly

I discovered the perlweekly.com by... Searching my own name on the Internet. (Sorry, I have some kinds of narcissistic behaviour).

~~It is until this week I learnt that PWC is a subproject of Perl Weekly.~~^[2] Oh.

And I learnt in Perl Weekly that, blogs.perl.org has been a bit stuck. Knowing this makes me start to build a new blog for use. Probably it will be seen the next next week in PWC RECAP.

3. Books
As mentioned, "Perl Debugged" and "Perl Best Practices".

Many challenges in PWC can extend to interesting investigations. I am usually interested in the math aspect. (But the Collatz problem is part of an undigest area for mathematicians, as the legendary mathematician Paul Erdos (1913-1996) said, "Mathematics is not ready for such problems." .) (I still remember my PWC#049 Task #1 code. However, I haven't got time and system skills to improvise it for test case n=9999 (the script returns "out of memory") or deal with deeper mathematics within.)

(There is a problem of perfect numbers in PWC#008; I coded it, then annoyed, then from the review + blog I got that normally it will take hours to get the sixth perfect number - unless you know the incident between Mersenne primes and perfect numbers. I had thought that PWC#054 was playing similar tricks.)

Besides math aspect, there is a syntax aspect. I will save a copy of other's effective solutions which have references, functions, lines, data structures or idioms I am not very understanding with sometimes.

Time for books now. Live healthy and conscientiously.

Remarks:

[1]: It is Laurent's blogpost a few days ago: Revisiting the Collatz Sequence (PWC 54)

Its related discussion on Perl Monks

(Though the monk Mario has used threading on Perl. I just have a thought: as Raku supports concurrency naturally, will Raku scripts be on average faster than Perl scripts on "daily" programming tasks or some specific platforms one day?)

[2]: See https://perlweeklychallenge.org/blog/perl-weekly-challenge-057/. # 5pm 20th Apr 2020

(My 40-hr nervousness might set a world record of the slowest script for that task, afterall!)