Grinnz

Recent Actions

• Commented on AI as a Chance - Opinion
  I will not, and they are not humanoid in any sense. Thank you for your opinion....
• Commented on Importance of Repositories in Public
  I agree that CopyFilesFromBuild is the wrong way to solve this problem and takes control away from the developer and contributors. Another solution to this (which doesn't quite solve the same problems as you did here) is the regenerate command...
• Commented on AI as a Chance - Opinion
  I disagree with the comparison to automation in agriculture or factories. That automation is designed to reliably perform a defined task and simply does it much better than a human can, and so the downside is confined to economic labor...
• Posted CPAN Dependencies, static and dynamic to Grinnz

  Dependencies or prerequisites are an integral feature of the CPAN software repository. They define what other CPAN modules are required for a particular CPAN distribution to be built, tested, or ultimately to function, as well as optionally to improve or add functionality. To define them properly…

• 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?...
• Commented on Learning XS - Prototyping
  Be cautious considering prototypes as "expected argument types" or "to check the number of arguments." Prototypes do not do this. They define how the arguments to the function are parsed, coercing the argument list as specified. For example, a prototype...
• Posted CGI::Tiny - Perl CGI, but modern to Grinnz

  Originally published at dev.to

  In a previous blog post, I explored the modern way to write CGI scripts using frameworks like ="https:/…

• Commented on Migrating from DBD::mysql to DBD::MariaDB
  Hi dami, You are correct that they cannot guess the intended encoding of a string, but the issue here is that DBD::mysql attempts to (intentionally or not) based on the internal storage of the string. The correct behavior is to...
• Posted Migrating from DBD::mysql to DBD::MariaDB to Grinnz

  DBD::mysql has long provided the interface to connect to the MySQL database from Perl code. But as old as it is, it was implemented with some critical bugs that cannot simply be corrected without breaking mountains of existing code relying on…

• Commented on A dream resyntaxed
  > But can we really specify unlifted methods? (And is "technically sufficient" really good enough?) > Are people really going to be happy that they can't use objects in BEGIN blocks (or pass them as arguments to use statements)? Or...
• Commented on How I Uploaded a CPAN Module
  Do not use tar to create tarballs for CPAN. Always use `make dist` or `./Build dist` or the release building mechanism of your author tool. This creates the correct metadata....
• Commented on Switch lots of things on at once
  Also check out Import::Base, which is just a wrapper around Import::Into to make this specific sort of module....
• Commented on I failed to pause before blogging
  There is no reason the BLOCK has to be on the same line either. Anyway, making sure you don't have anything following 'package' on the line is an appropriate solution in this case. And probably including a comment so the...
• Posted Perl 7: A Modest Proposal to Grinnz

  I've written a new blog post on Perl 7 (prev: Perl 7: A Risk-Benefit Analysis and Perl 7 By Default). You can find it, and…

• Commented on Perl 7 By Default
  That is the very change in interpreter defaults this post is discussing....
• Posted Perl 7 By Default to Grinnz

  Perl 7 has been announced as the next direction of Perl development. My previous blog post explored at a high level the risks and benefits of…

• Posted Perl 7: A Risk-Benefit Analysis to Grinnz

  At the recent Conference in the Cloud for Perl and Raku, Sawyer X (the pumpking of Perl) announced an ambitious plan for Perl 7. Since Perl 6 was renamed to Raku to better…

• Commented on Preallocating scalars
  You may also find the utility functions in FFI::Platypus::Memory and FFI::Platypus::Buffer interesting, though those are really for dealing with opaque pointers to strings when FFI::Platypus's standard C-to-Perl string conversion isn't sufficient....
• Commented on A Date with CPAN, Update #3: Golden Jubilee
  A variant similar to what you added is coming to a future version of Time::Local. PR#15 (links cause comments to be invisibly held for approval)...
• Commented on Are array and hash representations really needed in subroutine signatures?
  Yes. These do not represent just arrays and hashes, but "slurpy" parameters. This is the way to indicate that you want to accept any number (or zero) additional parameters. Hashes are a way to accept the extremely common named parameter...
• Commented on Can't post a comment here -- dunno why
  I pre-emptively sign out and back in before any attempt to post a comment, and separately before any attempt to post an article (these sections of the site appear to maintain separate logins)....
• Commented on Why is the specification of subroutine signatures so complicated?
  Because there are many different ideas, and thus expectations, of what features signatures need to have, else we risk simply changing the "Perl doesn't have signatures" criticism to "Perl's signatures are useless" when we don't fulfill someone's needs....
• Commented on What is the value that Perl offers?
  I agree Perl needs to carve its own path, but I disagree that we should blindly hold on to how things work. SUPER and bless don't need to go away, but we would be remiss to not consider adding more...
• Commented on Request for Feedback: Perl Documentation Site
  Gathering more data in a scientific manner is a good idea, but tangential to what we're trying to find out here. Data won't explain what people like or don't like about the style of the site, or what they wish...
• Commented on Request for Feedback: Perl Documentation Site
  My goal was primarily to resolve or avoid the issues brought up in the GitHub issue tracker (both the old and new ones). Beyond that, it is just personal preference, so we want to know what your (collectively) preferences are....
• Posted Request for Feedback: Perl Documentation Site to Grinnz

  The official Perl documentation site at https://perldoc.perl.org was recently overhauled. Independently, I put together a reimagined documentation site that would be hosted at https://perldoc.pl. In the interest of providing…

• Commented on Why forward compatibility is important when trying to add a new grammar to Perl
  This is not exactly what forward compatibility means. It means designing the system to recognize features that it does not implement, so it still works as well as it used to, but it does not mean that the new features...
• Posted Task::Kensho needs your help! to Grinnz

  CPAN is wonderful and it is vast. Task::Kensho offers a curated look at the best it has to offer for those who don't know what to look for. But to remain useful, it must keep up with the trends of CPAN and the community. Thus, the community's…

• Commented on The Time::Local Trap
  Indeed, that is why the mentioned workaround works - in the heuristic, years less than 0 are always interpreted as the offset from 1900, and years greater than 999 (which a positive number + 1900 will be) are interpreted as...
• Commented on Perl Weekly Challenge 017: Ackermann Function and URL Parsing
  You might check out URI::Nested to deal with subschemes....

Comment Threads

• 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…

• PetaMem commented on AI as a Chance - Opinion

  I disagree with your notion of LLMs being "probabilistic models". You may confuse LLMs with SNLP. LLMs can be configured to produce deterministic output, but effectively this never happens and there is no value in making that happen. If you need that, write algorithms.

  Also, LLM does not equal LLM. There are vast differences in architecture (the inference pipeline), so throwing all in the same pot is ... let's say unscientific at best.

  The usage of the word "forever" on the topic of self-driving cars looks like one of two options: a) calcified opinion made some time back b) b…