Aristotle

• Website: plasmasturm.org/
• About: Waxing philosophical

Recent Actions

• Commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance
  I need to say this plainly: every single pull request was reviewed and merged by me. Not rubber-stamped. Reviewed. When you review at breakneck speeds like 190 PRs per week, what you approve is stuff like this: https://github.com/cpan-authors/XML-Parser/pull/118#issuecomment-4165348882 … and...
• Commented on Perl 5’s list-flattening and reference-taking design choices
  Thanks for that insight! Funny, I never made that connection, even though it’s so obvious now that you point it out. I knew that Perl 4 lacked nested data structures and that Perl 5 had to retrofit them into the language –...
• Commented on Taking the Win - Perl in the TIOBE Index
  Username does not check out....
• Commented on perlmodules.net is down for 1-2 weeks
  Done. You’re aware you can edit your posts, though, yes?...
• Commented on ANNOUNCE: Perl.Wiki V 1.36
  I don't remember an interaction where an LLM didn’t try to flatter me. Everything I ask is always an extremely interesting and central question and my objections are always absolutely right, etc. You may be falling for the LLMentalist effect...
• Commented on Is it still worth adding installation instructions to a distribution?
  I’ll take this opportunity to plug my Pod::Readme::Brief, which generates a README roughly along the lines that brian suggests. You can look at its own README for an example of its output....
• Commented on Scoping out an even conciser fork idiom
  I do in fact not feel bad at all, I’m just posting this because if I missed this then I’m sure a lot of other people have as well, even at my level of expertise in Perl.And though I’ve always...
• Posted Scoping out an even conciser fork idiom to Aristotle

  Years ago I wrote about a concise fork idiom. It turns out that it’s possible to do better than everything I discussed in that entry as well as the proposals in the comments.

  I didn’t at the…

• Commented on Once more unto the Wide character (U+XXXX) in substitution (s///)
  Thank you!! I asked about this on #p5p at the time but nobody who happened to be around at that moment could solve the mystery for me either. So the only thing I missed was that it’s necessary to set...
• Posted Once more unto the Wide character (U+XXXX) in substitution (s///) to Aristotle

  I wrote very elliptically about this warning and received some helpful comments with the standard advice about how to proceed when encountering it. Except unfortunately that advice will be of no use when you encounter…

• Posted Class data for cheapskates to Aristotle

  sub some_field : lvalue { state $value = 'some_default' }
  

  (We know, of course, that “class data” is OOPese for “global variable”.)

• Posted Wide character (U+XXXX) in substitution (s///) to Aristotle

  There is a “use locale” somewhere in the code you are running.

  Update: This is specifically in reference to warning about wide characters “in substitution”. See also ="/users/aristotle/2…

• Commented on The Science Perl Journal, Issue #1 (Vol. 1, No. 1) is finally here!
  Personal principle keeps me from throwing you off of b.p.o for this, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find it deeply embarrassing to be hosting such a marginally-apologetic spammer on the platform that I’m paying hundreds of bucks per year...
• Commented on This week in PSC (157) | 2024-08-23
  PHP has the info() function for a very different reason: it tells you ⓐ what options the language has been compiled with because ⓑ you cannot examine them directly without shell access to the host. So it covers a set...
• Commented on New class of memory leaks inaugurated by Perl v5.40 (and we are unprepared for that)
  Sorry about that....
• Posted Never matching: everybody is doing it wrong to Aristotle

  Well, not actually wrong, just slow. But the exaggeration makes a punchier headline, you’ll admit.

  This comes up when an interface takes a pattern to match things against. Sometimes you have some reason to want this match to always fail, so you want to pass a pattern which will never mat…

• Commented on Is Perl a write only language?
  Oh, I see. I completely misread that, and probably so did Randal. Under that misreading, your first reply to Randal reads like a doubling down on that apparent position, when actually that response is just prioritizing overtly demonstrating disregard for...
• Commented on Is Perl a write only language?
  But that has nothing to do with understanding why in the world he's objecting to saying teachers who tell their students perl is hard should not be teaching computer programming courses. He is not in the world objecting to that....
• Posted Dodging the Go loop trap to Aristotle

  Ted Unangst:

  And now we’re trapped. There’s only one friend variable, constantly changing a…

• Commented on The Hidden Power of Prototypes
  That seems interesting in the sense of “may you live in interesting times” 😛 Another possibly useful prototype is the underscore (“_”), which allows functions to default to $_ when given no argument, like e.g. chr and hex do....
• Commented on No One Is Immune to Abuse
  You seem to be concerned about people liking you, so it could be anybody. Buzzard, Buzzard. If you go around accusing people of not knowing the difference between empathy and sympathy, maybe you should not be making the same mistake....
• Commented on No One Is Immune to Abuse
  Hey, the guy who doesn’t care is back to reaffirm his not caring. Welcome back. 🙂 Of course I’ma do me. Who else?...
• Commented on No One Is Immune to Abuse
  And yet, Dave. This article, which took days to compile and just as long to carefully brush out any polemic so it would stick entirely to facts and technical arguments… evidently nevertheless registered as an attack when published. It was...
• Commented on No One Is Immune to Abuse
  Hmm. I almost left Perl because of Sawyer’s stewardship. And I mostly dropped out of the community because watching the giant flamewar caused by the technical decisions he intended to pursue made me miserable. The exhaustion of bracing for the...
• Commented on Next stable DBD::SQLite will be released at the beginning of November
  Hi Doug, a blog comment column is probably not the best venue to raise a request of this nature. A mailing list or the issue tracker seem more suitable. And hey, look: https://github.com/DBD-SQLite/DBD-SQLite/issues/101 — sound familiar?...
• Commented on Profiling Perl under Apache
  Ah. That story is somewhat more complicated. These days when people say “Markdown” they mean a somewhat extended version of the syntax that most sites have converged on, whereas the Markdown plugin in use here is the O.G. Gruber Perl...
• Commented on Profiling Perl under Apache
  <code> does not work on the bash code above (adds some colours, but renders everything in a single wrapping line with the regular font) That is the opposite of not working. 🙂 You have to use it, like you would...
• Posted “Let Maintainers Be Maintainers” to Aristotle

  Graydon Hoare:

  […] Corporate-employed FOSS maintainers working at a firm with these [very common] “growth and novelty” incentives [… are…

• Commented on Mojocast #4: Stash, Flash, and Sessions
  This entry was posted in 2011. As early as 2013 the site was redirecting to some post on Google Plus (remember that thing?) which has since been lost, and unsurprisingly the domain was for sale half a year later. I...
• Commented on The first line of Perl_CGI script, env perl vs perl only, how different?
  Avoiding doing things on the shebang line is a matter of coding style and therefore subjective. There is a much more important reason to avoid -w, which is objective: it’s not at all the same thing as use warnings. Whereas...

Comment Threads

• Grinnz commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  I'm not sure where you got this idea. CPAN Testers covers whatever individual testers decide to cover, which certainly includes downstream deps of trial releases. But more importantly: how would it hurt?

• Dean commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  Having some mechanism to determine downstream breakage would be a net win with our without coding agents.

  It would be even more helpful with an automated mechanism to communicate changes to downstream authors.

  As far as I can tell, other languages are now pinning everything and using bots to move the pins when tests pass. This has the major upside of each project itself opting-in to tracking upstream changes - not just being blasted with automated break notifications from some system they haven't decided to care about (or even know about).

  Pros and cons - but a proble…

• Tom Wyant commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  I don't know how development releases would help you. I do know that just because one of my modules passes all tests on my box does not mean it will pass everywhere. If the problem is truly only downstream failures, maybe development releases wouldn't help.

  But maybe what this means is that we need more testing infrastructure -- something analogous to "Blead Breaks CPAN," but for CPAN itself, not perl.

• Robert Rothenberg commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  I have a lot of concerns about using LLMs.

  The sheer volume of code changes they can submit seems overwhelming. That's a lot to review, and it seems that bugs can slip through. I've seen some daft changes show up in codebases due to AI.

  There has also been some research in poisoning LLMs so that can insert security holes in code, not to mention years of badly-written/insecure code posted online that they have been trained on.

  There are also some serious legal and ethical concerns about using them:

  Do the PRs contain code snippets from other code with incompat…

• Todd Rinaldo commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  > I do know that just because one of my modules passes all tests on my box does not mean it will pass everywhere.

  One of the critical pieces we learned about rapid development was assuring a complex CI workflow. If you review one of the actions for XML-Parser at https://github.com/cpan-authors/XML-Parser/actions/runs/24453321541, you'll see we test, all versions of perl, with/without LWP, 3 downstream packages, fedora, macos, ubuntu, and 3 flavors of bsd. There are minor things we cannot get without c…