For the last meeting of the year we were all present again.
We have requested further input regarding our plan for TLS in core.
We picked the ball back up that we dropped regarding point releases. They should be coming soon.
We went over our findings so far regarding Perl 42. It looks like Perl versions will have to continue to be written with three components, so we will be stuck with a fixed .0 at the end. It’s slightly annoying, but we can live with it. We strategized about how to get more real-world data about feasibility, and discussed the possibility of releasing a perl-41.8 tarball alongside the regularly scheduled perl-5.41.8.
We are delighted to announce the new release, which includes 57 significant bug fixes compared to the previous 2.1.8 version. This update addresses a range of important issues and enhances the overall stability and performance.
See entire the post to learn about our future plans, in perpetuity.
The very first Perl Community Conference was a tremendous success thanks to everyone of you authors and speakers. Many thanks to PCC Co-Organizer Will "The Chill" Braswell, our friends at the Diogenes Hackerspace (in Austin, Texas), and all the participants both online and in person! We'll be following up soon about posting the videos. The next stage will be editing and publishing Issue #2 of the Science Perl Journal. The schedule from the Winter'24 PCC should be a clue about some of its contents. We have discussed offering a "Letters to the Editor" section to address feedback from friends and foes alike. More on this will be announced in future posts.
Let me start off by asking the folk on this platform one question. Imagine a scenario that you had lost something important with multiple potential negative consequences. For instance losing a bunch of keys including your car keys, your house keys, your changing room locker keys and a USB stick. What would be the greatest cause for alarm? I suspect that while there may be many possible answers aligned with each individual’s life priorities, the real men in this group know that the most feared is the reaction following the revelation to the wife. For while any calamitous occurrence may be approached objectively, with rationality, reflection and hopefully recovery, this particularly troublesome phase involves heightened emotions, reactivating Mrs Saif’s indelible memories of my many past failings. Objectivity, while desirable in principle, has to deal with such a tainted history.
Do you want LPW to happen again in 2025? Then you need to make it happen. You need to start thinking about this now. After Lee's closing talk, which detailed how organisation of the 2024 workshop worked and effectively put out a call for organisers for the future, a small number of attendees hinted they would be able to help out in one way or another. For that we are grateful.
However there is no core organising team yet for 2025. Someone, ideally two or three people, need to step up and explicitly say "we are going to organise LPW 2025". If you need help around any of this then we (the 2024 organisers) can guide you. The TPRF have also said they would like to explore how to support LPW 2025 and welcome potential organisers to join the monthly community meeting to discuss this.
Failing that LPW will be going on an indefinite hiatus again.
CosmoShop is the largest pure Perl based shop system.
Since 1997, we have been implementing sophisticated and individual eCommerce projects in the B2B sector with our specially developed store software. We are the central point of contact for the entire spectrum.
The Perl Community Conference is a hybrid in-person-and-online event held on December 18th from 10:30a-4:00p CST, Perl's 37th birthday, featuring talks from the world's top Perl programmers and community members. Topics include artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, web applications, chemometrics, genetics, data science, high performance computing, ethics, and much more!
We discussed the version 42 work on the psc/ppc0025 branch. We have an initial proof of concept that is almost good enough to test against CPAN in order to assess whether the plan is actually feasible and proceed from there. We discussed the timeline for this.
We reviewed our plan for TLS in core. Some questions came up based on the conversation on the p5p thread and we need specific next steps now that Craig has provided a patch for the first one. We hashed out next steps to keep this moving.
We briefly discussed the Random::Simple suggestion and decided we won’t address it at this time. (The inclusion of cryptography libraries in core will probably change the situation here in the foreseeable future.)
I skipped 2023 but in 2024 I'm actually doing two dev releases of Perl again. This time it is version 5.41.7.
And again, you can watch it live on Friday 20th of December on Twitch.
I have just released a trial version of
PPI that includes the
first shot at support for Perl signatures. After installing it, you can access
this feature in the following ways.
For users of perlcritic and other PPI consumers:
include use 5.035; or higher in your code
include use feature 'signatures'; in your code
include a known signatures-enable strictures modules from CPAN in your code,
e.g. Mojolicious::Lite, Modern::Perl
if you enable signatures via a custom strictures module, declare it via %ENV:
PPI_CUSTOM_FEATURE_INCLUDES='{MyStrict=>{signatures=>1}}' perlcritic Work.pm
Someone wanting to make a social media site (such as a Mastodon server & web client for example) will want to allow its users to post URLs, for which previews will be shown in their posts.
These posts will be visited by a UserAgent, but there is the risk that a private IP (disguised as a FQDN hostname that resolves to it) will be in the URL's host, and that might cause security issues.
I could use LWP::ParanoidAgent, but then I'd have to fork a process to make the whole thing async, like a good Mojolicious site will be, and too many processes running can be a problem. Also I'd be missing on the many Roles that exist for Mojo::Useragent.
The sound quality of the recordings is not fantastic. We had some sort of issue that I've tried to fix in post. However, the auto generated captions by YouTube tend to be pretty good these days, so enable those if you have any problems understanding the speaker.
I go into the details a bit more about this in a personal blog post about the event, and how much effort is involved in trying to create the recordings, amongst other things.
Thanks to this year's sponsors, without whom LPW would not have happened:
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on November 3, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
Task 1:
You are given a list of dominoes, @dominoes.
Write a script to return the number of dominoes that are similar to any other domino.
$dominoes[i] = [a, b] and $dominoes[j] = [c, d] are same if either (a = c and b = d) or (a = d and b = c).
I was one of the organisers of the London Perl and Raku Workshop 2024, which happened last weekend. I've written about my own personal experience of this conference over on my personal blog.
Someone keeps registering and posting articles with links to the “skale.space” domain despite the fact that I keep deleting them, so I thought I should reward them for their effort.
They are some kind of blockchain shop (yeah, shady activities, how uncharacteristic, right?), so I don’t know that my usual note that you might want to know that if you do business with them is all that relevant, but, there you go.
To the old Perl programmers out there looking for a new language to learn, I suggest giving Julia a serious look. I haven't had a language bring me this much joy since when I first discovered Perl a long time ago. If Perl is the grandpa, Julia is the granddaughter, and she's a really smart girl. She hangs out with scientists all day helping them make sense of their data, and she does it with a unique style.
To be continued...
(There's so much I want to say, but I don't want to commit the time to write it all down right now.)
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on October 27, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
Task 1: Twice Largest
You are given an array of integers, @ints, where the largest integer is unique.
Write a script to find whether the largest element in the array is at least twice as big as every element in the given array. If it is return the index of the largest element or return -1 otherwise.
