Paul Johnson

• Website: www.pjcj.net
• About: I don't really blog about Perl.

Recent Actions

• Posted The Perl Toolchain Summit 2024 to Paul Johnson

  Sometimes life catches up with you. I've felt that way for the last few years and I'm probably not alone.

  During that time the cpancover project has basically just been plodding along, pretty much just working. As new modules were uploaded to CPAN, cpancover would pick them up, calculate…

• Posted The Perl Toolchain Summit 2023 to Paul Johnson

  After a break of four years, it has been my privilege to attend the 13th Perl Toolchain Summit (née Perl QA Hackathon). This is the third time the summit has been held in Lyon and the tenth summit I have been able to attend. PTS is a…

• Posted The Perl Toolchain Summit 2019 to Paul Johnson

  This year I was again privileged to attend the Perl Toolchain Summit, held at Bisham Abbey, near Marlow in southern England.

  The Perl Toolchain summit is an opport…

• Posted The Perl Toolchain Summit 2018 to Paul Johnson

  This year marks the 10 year anniversary of the Perl Toolchain Summit, formerly

  The Perl Toolchain Summit provides an opportunity for around 30 Perl developers to get together for four days or so to talk about and develop the infrastructure which surrounds Pe…

• Commented on Deprecated not depreciated
  Great. So now that's sorted perhaps we can move on to letting people know that "performant" isn't a word. OK, yes, it is, but it doesn't mean what you think it means....
• Posted Perl Toolchain Summit 2017 - Day 4 to Paul Johnson

  I didn't get as much done on the final day of the Perl Toolchain Summit because helping me, which is even better.

  Devel::Cover has always had a problem in that top level statements (those not in a sub) in module…

• Posted Perl Toolchain Summit 2017 - Day 3 to Paul Johnson

  My third day at the Perl Toolchain Summit was primarily spent in trying system and less of a Devel::Cover playground. The first step in this direction was supposed to be easy - I made a login for the metacpan group wi…

• Posted Perl Toolchain Summit 2017 - Day 2 to Paul Johnson

  My first day at the Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS) was largely spent coding, or less of that sort of stuff, and a lot more of the sort of stuff that it's much harder to do away from the summit.

  But it started off with…

• Posted Perl Toolchain Summit 2017 - Day 1 to Paul Johnson

  This year the Perl QA Hackathon has been rebranded as the Perl Toolchain Summit been held and, after missing the first few due to scheduling conflicts with my (then young) children's birthdays, I suppose I have now bec…

• Posted Half time at the Perl QA Hackathon 2016 to Paul Johnson

  Two days down, two to go.

  The Perl QA Hackathon for 2016 is being held in Rugby. We are now half way though. This is the first year in quite a few when I haven't come to the event with Devel::Cover failing tests against the imminent new Perl release, and this has given me a little more t…

• Posted Happy 15th Birthday, Devel::Cover! to Paul Johnson

  Today is Devel::Cover's 15th anniversary. Version 0.01 was released on 9th
  first Perl version which provided the necessary infrastructure for Devel::Cover
  to work.

  In commemoration I have rel…

• Commented on Upping minimum version for Devel::Cover
  A big thank-you to everyone who has taken the time to comment on this. I am surprised and gratified that people think it important enough to spend some time on. Ultimately, I believe I would like to leave the commit...
• Posted Upping minimum version for Devel::Cover to Paul Johnson

  Devel::Cover is fast approaching its fifteenth birthday. When it was released the minimum Perl version supported was 5.6.1, and that was because the mechanism Devel::Cover needed was not introduced until 5.6.1.

  Since that time, Devel::Cover has supported every new, stable version of Perl,…

• Posted Final TPF Devel::Cover grant report to Paul Johnson

  In accordance with the terms of my grant from TPF this is the final report for my work on improving Devel::Cover.
  Since the last report I have released version…

• Posted TPF Devel::Cover grant report May/June 2014 to Paul Johnson

  [ I have been sending these grant reports to the perl-qa mailing list, whence they have found their way to news.perlfoundation.org. It was quite rightly suggested that it was appropriate to post them here…

• Commented on Automatic variable highlighting in vim
  I have spoken to Sandeep, the author of the plugin for PHP, and to Ovid, and I have put together a repository for this. You can find it at https://github.com/pjcj/vim-hl-var The main change I have made is to stop the...
• Posted QA Hackathon 2014 to Paul Johnson

  This year's QA hackathon was held last weekend in Lyon. 30 of the nicest and cleverest people I know met for four days with the common goal of improving Perl's quality with specific reference to testing and the toolchain. I was there too.

• Commented on Google Code-In 2012
  Unfortunately we were not successful in our application to be a part of GCI in 2012. Google received many more applications for the program than they are able to accommodate. Many thanks to everyone who submitted tasks or who volunteered...
• Posted Google Code-In 2012 to Paul Johnson

  Could your module or project benefit from having someone

  • fix a specific bug
  • add a test for a specific feature
  • improve test coverage by 5%
  • write a tutorial
  • create a screencast for beginners
  • write an example program
  • create a …
• Commented on Stupid benchmarks and a bit of confusion
  I think the problem is that you're just printing details for the main program, not the subroutines. $ perl -MO=Concise,bitwise,comp comp.pl main::bitwise: 5 leavesub[1 ref] K/REFC,1 ->(end) - lineseq KP ->5 1 nextstate(main 294 up:5) v:*,&,$,134219776 ->2 4 bit_and[t2] sK...
• Commented on Swiss Perl Workshop 2013
  Super!...
• Posted cpancover to Paul Johnson

  I've started work on my Devel::Cover grant from TPF. If you are interested you can see my report for the first week at http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.qa/2012/05/msg13184.html.

  As a part of that work I have upd…

• Commented on Perl vs Shell Scripts
  Your other blog wouldn't let me comment, but I would have written: ----- Or you could use zsh and get the best of both worlds. Or even better. It might not be worth it for you if you are happy...
• Posted Vim report for Devel::Cover (Perl QA Hackathon) - part 2 to Paul Johnson

  At last week's QA Hackathon in Paris I put together a Vim report for Devel::Cover to show coverage information as Vim signs. See https://blogs.perl.org/users/paul_johnson/2012/03/vim-report-for-develcover-perl-qa-hackathon.html

  Whilst nice, and somewhat useful, this was very much a proof …

• Commented on Vim report for Devel::Cover (Perl QA Hackathon)
  @sawyerx Thanks! @gabor Are you using version 0.85? The initial release had the behaviour you observe but, of course, it is much more useful to annotate the files you edit rather than (just) the copies which are run, so the...
• Posted Vim report for Devel::Cover (Perl QA Hackathon) to Paul Johnson

  Last night over dinner I had a discussion with Miyagawa about what Devel::Cover could steal from Ruby. He mentioned a Ruby backend which uses Vim signs to show coverage information.

  So today I shamelessly stole it and produced a basic …

• Posted Perl Accepted For GCI - Now We Just Need Students to Paul Johnson

  Some of you may remember that a couple of weeks ago I wrote about how The Perl Foundation was hoping to take part in the Google Code-in 2011 (

• Posted More about GCI 2011 to Paul Johnson

  The Google Code-in 2011 (GCI) will be starting shortly. This is the programme under which students aged between 13 and 17 years are encouraged to get involved in open source projects. The Perl Foundation would like Perl to be a part of this…

• Posted GCI 2011 to Paul Johnson

  The Perl Foundation is hoping to take part in the Google Code-in once again this year. This is a programme under which students aged between 13 and 17 are able to undertake short, well defined tasks…

• Posted Variable Names to Paul Johnson

  I wrote this on beginners@perl.org today in a thread which was discussing short variable names:

  
  My own take on variable names is that naming is one of the hardest problems in software development, and that the length of a variable name should reflect the length of the scope in which…

Comment Threads

• Dmitry Karasik commented on Automatic variable highlighting in vim

  nice

• Steven Haryanto commented on Automatic variable highlighting in vim

  I'm still using auto-highlight-symbol-mode (instead of highlight). And am wondering if I can get Emacs to switch between highlighting %hash and all $hash{foo}, or just highlighting a specific $hash{foo}.

• naveedm9 commented on Automatic variable highlighting in vim

  Robin, Ultimatto, confuseAcat fixes the sigil negotiation and does it with much less and simpler code: https://blogs.perl.org/users/confuseacat/2014/05/automatic-variable-highlighting-in-vim-the-easy-way.html

• Tim Bunce commented on Automatic variable highlighting in vim

  Damian Conway has implemented a typically awesome plugin for automatic variable highlighting (and more):

  https://github.com/thoughtstream/Damian-Conway-s-Vim-Setup/blob/master/plugin/trackperlvars.vim

• mug896 commented on Perl vs Shell Scripts

  In bash you cant set IFS=$'\n' instead of IFS="
  "