Randal L. Schwartz

• Website: www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/
• About: print "Just another Perl hacker"; # the original!

Recent Actions

• Posted A bit of history about The Gecko Book, aka "Learning Perl on Win32 Systems"... (from my "Half my life with Perl" talk a decade ago) to Randal L. Schwartz

  

  
  

• Commented on Perl Weekly Challenge 208: Minimum Index Sum and Duplicate and Missing
  Bing chat got a hole-in-one on both problems, with some head scratching way to solve the second one. All I gave it was the text literally as-is, plus the instruction "solve this in Perl". Wow. use strict; use warnings; sub...
• Commented on ChatGPT for Perl Learning
  Here's what bing chat (itself a cousin of ChatGPT) had to say about your opening paragraph, and I agree: Using ChatGPT to generate Perl code can be a useful strategy for some people. It can help generate decent Perl code...
• Commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license
  I concede. Y'all have made good points. I withdraw any objection to the effort....
• Commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license
  Artistic 2 has already had thorough legal review. Has something happened in copyright law to require a new review?...
• Commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license
  Given that both Artistic 1 and Artistic 2 are clearly OSI-approved licenses, I don't see what the benefit is to relicense anything. Can someone explain this to me in simple terms?...
• Posted Perl is not dead to Randal L. Schwartz

  Came across an interesting video from one of the users of Perl: Is Perl dead? @Randal L. Schwartz on Dart and Flutter @Code Maven

• Posted "My half-life with Perl" from OSCON 2013 live encore performance to Randal L. Schwartz

  I've been asked by a couple of Perl groups to give a virtual presentation. Writing new material that would only have been shown once is a lot of work for a small reward.

  But, I just happened to be cleaning out my virtual junk drawer, and stumbled across my "half my life with Perl" slide d…

• Commented on Perl Podcasts
  I'm no longer running (or hosting) FLOSS Weekly. After 13 years, I decided to take those 6 hours per week back to work on other things. Also, you spelled my name wrong. :(...
• Commented on .9999% Pure Moose.
  Less than 1%? Maybe you meant 99.99%?...
• Commented on Don't use until, unless...
  Just really avoid "unless... else". That's... just.... wrong....
• Commented on C comments and regular expressions
  Your problem is the greediness of the .* here: qr!/\*.*\*\/!s Just use a lazy version: qr!/\*.*?\*\/!s...
• Commented on What is a "Senior Developer"?
  Are you able to move towards the goal at least in part by eliminating the risk that you might be wrong? If not, you have some learnin' to do....
• Commented on Highlights from TPC 2017
  For your polyglot section, there was also my lightning talk on monday about looking in to Dart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDMMF_b7Kbs...
• Commented on Something New Every Day
  Clever!...
• Commented on New to Perl? Come to The Perl Conference in Orlando for only $50.
  April 10th, 2016 12:01:00 AM EST Since EST won't exist until November, what are you actually intending?...
• Commented on On The Mojolicious Codebase
  The irony of forking things that are themselves forks of sane modules. Joy....
• Commented on ZipRecruiter is sponsoring the QA Hackathon
  And yes, I'm very happy that ZipRecruiter has paid a significant chunk of my bills for over two years....
• Posted chat2.pl just got real to Randal L. Schwartz

  20 years ago, I really wanted the chat2.pl domain name, to commemorate the one piece of code I ever contributed to the core. I even wrote the .pl administrators, and got no response.

  Well, guess what I have now! chat2.pl!

  Behold the wonder that is:…

• Commented on This just in: study shows advantages to RTFM
  I'm confused by your comment. What "test" did you add? An email address with a space after the @ is perfectly valid. The other system is broken. Is Email::Valid erroneously flagging that as invalid?...
• Posted Found a bug in File::Finder to Randal L. Schwartz

  I uploaded File::Finder to the CPAN more than a decade ago. I was using it for a project today, and found a bug that has been in there in the beginning. I forgot to localize $_ in ->contains, which clobbered File::Find's $_, used by just about everything else.

  I couldn't even remember wh…

• Commented on Which CPAN distributions include jquery.js ?
  Heh. chat2.pl...
• Commented on MetaCPAN Thanks Bytemark for Two Years as a Hosting Sponsor
  I'm still sad that search.cpan.org has more SEO than metacpan. I'd really like to just forget about search.cpan.org at this point....
• Commented on YAPC::BR 2015 - Sep 18-20
  I've got the dates free. If you want some more English content, I'd be happy to pop down there....
• Commented on Removing AUTOLOAD from CGI.pm
  I'm just happy that CGI.pm, which has made me a lot of money over the decades, is getting some attention. Yeay!...
• Commented on A note about X500::DN and X500::DN::Marpa
  It always seems amazing that people propose standards that require some intense amount of parsing just to get basic values. :)...
• Commented on The Silver Camel goes to ... Mark Keating
  Wait... silver camel? What are those? Tried googling, but that showed nothing....
• Posted git blame across the entire codebase to Randal L. Schwartz

  A few years ago, a script showed up on the git mailing list that would effectively run "git blame" across the entire tree, and aggregate the line counts by author. Here's the first 50 authors as of commit 86714aaae213175ea8c716ad22c1e10300d5bf61:

  Total lines: 2…

• Commented on Spelunking: why 'while(){ }' is my new favorite perl-ism
  Well, they're real git commits, for sure. But they are cloned from all the things that preceded git for Perl's version control by an immense effort to accurate capture as much of Perl history as was now possible....
• Posted detecting "too heavy" views in Template Toolkit to Randal L. Schwartz

  $client is doing a lot of heavy lifting (perhaps accidentally) in some Catalyst-driven Template Toolkit code. Apparently, it's far too easy to pass a DBIx::Class object into the stash, and then trigger things that end up hitting the database... from the view. That wouldn't be horrible, except…

Comment Threads

• Smylers commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers

  Both good ideas. %C didn't exist when I wrote the above.

  On a laptop only used by me, I was using /tmp/ (it avoids need to know your username to put in the config), but for shared computers it isn't a good idea.

• Robert Rothenberg commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license

  This is a problem with the company's procedures, not with Perl's or modules' licenses.

  It is not worth the (mostly unpaid) time of a CPAN author to contact contributors and change the licenses on what may be dozens of modules, because a potential u…

• Dean commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license

  The assertion that "It isn't worth the (mostly unpaid) time" ignores the reasoning for an author writing and releasing the software in the first place.

  If the author releases the software hoping that supporting it will generate business (consulting, supporting, or even just reputational) then lowering adoption friction is a good thing making the effort worthwhile.

  IMO this is the scenario that most suits the rationale for a permissive license.

  If the software is more oriented to hobby users and not intended for businesses to sell it, then it is more up to the author.…

• Dimitrios Kechagias commented on ChatGPT for Perl Learning

  If you don't already know what you are doing, ChatGPT can be very misleading. It's designed to be the world's greatest bullshitter after all.

  > ChatGPT, can you give me a regular expression that matches a repeating pattern of two characters that are different from each other?

  > Certainly! The regular expression that matches a repeating pattern of two characters that are different from each other is:

  (\w)\1

  Explanation:
  (\w) matches any word character and captures it as the first group.
  \1 matches the exact same character as the one captured in the…

• vkavalov commented on ChatGPT for Perl Learning

  Perl is like the sharp guy in the back office who can solve any problem fast and efficiently. Doesn't care about the "fashion du jour" - just what works and is efficient. And then are the "me too"s, who spent their time sensing the daily winds and making sure they are sexier than the next one. And that's how they win the hearts and minds of the most young and superficial minds. But every now and then there is a "fashion" that is the real thing and somehow perl made a few bad bets.
  …