We went through all the open PPC pull requests, with a goal of merging or closing as many of them as possible. The actual merging or closing will happen soon.
We merged PPC0025: “Perl 5 is Perl”.
We discussed some possible shortcomings of the PPC process and wrote down a few ideas for how we might address them. We intend to discuss these with the people originally involved with defining the PPC process.
We want to write PSC blog posts to put intentions and ideas on record for the future. We discussed topics for blog posts we want to post soon.
We discussed the structure of our meetings, to make sure we take care of our duties and avoid losing track of things.
A longer blog post will follow, likely on my personal site (I'll try to avoid it sitting in my drafts folder for too long). In the meantime, thanks to all who attended, spoke, volunteered, helped, advertised, promoted, linked to, encouraged, and so on, this year's London Perl & Raku Workshop. I think it worked out.
Scarves. This year's surprise swag, a 20th anniversary scarf rather than the usual t-shirt. We sill have a few of these left and I'm happy to send you one if you cover the cost of postage and packaging (roughly 15.- CHF). Please email the organisers if you would like one. It wil be first come (emailed) first served. Any that remain I will probably take to GPW next year to give away.
Videos. I will be processing these over the next couple of weeks. Expect them to be available on YouTube sometime mid November.
Feedback. If you attended the workshop it will really help us if you fill in the feedback form. All questions are optional and it is anonymous. Approximately 120 people attended the workshop - if half of you can complete the form that would be smashing.
Next Year? We have no plans. Yet.
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 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.
We continued refining our plan for TLS in core. We will collect
feedback on its feasibility from the maintainers of the relevant
modules.
We reviewed the status of putting the apostrophe package separator
behind a feature and approved the PR.
We confirmed that we want to deprecate smartmatch with a feature. This
effectively means that we don’t plan for a “better smartmatch” at this
time (but it can still be pursued in future, by way of the air gap
strategy, if there is appetite). We will file an issue for this.
We agreed that “negative” features (rather than outright removal) is
our preferred way to deprecate historical Perl quirks as the language
continues to evolve.
We discussed our ongoing inadequacy at dealing with maintenance
releases. We wrote down next steps to get back on track, and also
started looking into capturing a checklist to document the process.
After hundreds of hours of work and support from lots of people, the long promised Journal is here. That link will take you to some more information, on there a link to purchase is available. All proceeds go to supporting future Issues and events of the SPC and Perl Community Organization. At this time, an electronic version is not available due to end-of-year time constraints.
It may seem silly, but we spent extra time making sure the book spine looks good on a bookshelf and will look even better as the Issues accrue. Get it while it's hot. ISBN-13: 9798218984748, 152 pages.
Some of us are currently preparing for a block of Science Perl Talks at the London Perl & Raku Workshop 2024. We appreciate the organizers of this event for the opportunity.
More will be posted after the LPW, but the SPC is hosting the Perl Community Conference, Winter 2024 on December 18th (Perl's 37th birthday! :-)). If you are interested in getting published in the next Issue of the SPJ (Winter 2024), we are still accepting extended abstracts, which is up to 1 full page in the Journal and a 5 minute lightning talk slot at the Winter Conference.
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.)
We were joined by Leon Timmermans and Tim Legge to discuss plans for TLS support in core.
We talked about our inadequate handling of point releases and especially security releases. In the past this was handled on individual initiative. We need to institutionalize at least some of this as actual process to keep things on the rails.
We discussed with Leon and Tim what we want to do to have TLS support in core. Future support for underlying APIs other than OpenSSL is desirable. Net::SSLeay also has cruft that we would prefer to avoid in core.
In my previous articles (#1 and #2), I covered the key activities of The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF), such as organizing conferences, providing grants, and other smaller initiatives. In this final article, I will explore TPRF's financials using publicly available data. As a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, TPRF is required to disclose their financial information to the IRS. As always, my opinions are my own and do not represent the views of the TPRF Board.
Revenue and Expenses: Year-to-Year Overview
Let's start by reviewing TPRF's revenue and expenses over the years.
Until 2019, both revenue and expenses fluctuated. However, in 2020, the financial landscape changed significantly, with both revenue and expenses dropping sharply. This trend continued into 2021, largely because TPRF held its conferences virtually, reducing costs but also potentially limiting revenue opportunities.
In 2023, TPRF experienced another sharp decline in revenue while expenses surged, leading to a large deficit of $140,213.
Here's a comparison of key financial figures over three years:
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on October 20, 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: Middle Index
You are given an array of integers, @ints.
Write a script to find the leftmost middle index (MI) i.e. the smallest amongst all the possible ones.
A middle index is an index where ints[0] + ints[1] + … + ints[MI-1] == ints[MI+1] + ints[MI+2] + … + ints[ints.length-1].
If MI == 0, the left side sum is considered to be 0. Similarly, if MI == ints.length - 1, the right side sum is considered to be 0.
Return the leftmost MI that satisfies the condition, or -1 if there is no such index.
It's a little over a week until this year's London Perl and Raku Workshop. Here's a couple of things to note about the day.
The schedule is relatively fixed at this point, however if you haven't already starred the talks you plan to attend then please do so as this will inform any tweaks. The venue has a large room (150 people) and a smaller room (35 people) therefore it is helpful to know which talks might be heavily attended in advance so we can make sure those talks have enough space.
The venue, The Trampery in Old Street, is located a two minute walk from the Northern Line's Old Street tube station in central London. The Northern Line has stops at most of the major train stations in London, or trivial links to others, so we recommend taking the tube to get to the venue.
We exchanged Perl (re)branding ideas with Olaf. We will be keeping in touch on that front.
We discussed the feedback on feature-guarding and unbundling apostrophe. We came up with a strategy to propose that we think should work, which will be posted on the relevant thread.
We discussed the fact that keeping the current smartmatch operator (as a feature) means we can’t have a meaningful air gap to prevent subtle bugs when moving to a future “good” smartmatch. This probably implies that we would be giving up on any future smart match operator, but there are usually better replacements.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on October 13, 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: Double Exist
You are given an array of integers, @ints.
Write a script to find if there exist two indices $i and $j such that:
I am in the process of adding OpenWeatherMap support to Xasteria Weather for iOS and the proxy I built is in Perl. Since there was only an old module on CPAN which did not support the current API and was not easily updatable, I released Weather::OWM. It's a very simple module, similar to two other Weather modules I've released in the past (Weather::WeatherKit and Weather::Astro7Timer).
The OpenWeather API has a Free tier with both current weather and forecast, which makes the module useful to anyone interested in fetching weather for any location. E.g.
This year's London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Without our sponsors this event would not happen and we would like to thank them.
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We devised a strategy to deal with smartmatch, starting with reverting its removal. A separate email with details will follow.
We spent too much time talking about putting the apostrophe package separator behind a feature. That too will be outlined in a separate email. A github issue will follow.
We want to revert the open undef patch, for a variety of reasons, such as breaking autodie. We decided the steps to handle this.
