MCE - How to?

Have you used CPAN module MCE for parallel processing?

If not then you should checkout this post for introduction.

https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/mce-how-to

This week in PSC (172) | 2024-12-12

All three of us attended.

  • We discussed the version 42 work on the psc/ppc0025 branch. We have an initial proof of concept that is almost good enough to test against CPAN in order to assess whether the plan is actually feasible and proceed from there. We discussed the timeline for this.
  • We reviewed our plan for TLS in core. Some questions came up based on the conversation on the p5p thread and we need specific next steps now that Craig has provided a patch for the first one. We hashed out next steps to keep this moving.
  • We briefly discussed the Random::Simple suggestion and decided we won’t address it at this time. (The inclusion of cryptography libraries in core will probably change the situation here in the foreseeable future.)

[P5P posting of this summary]

Live-streaming Perl 5.41.7 development release

I skipped 2023 but in 2024 I'm actually doing two dev releases of Perl again. This time it is version 5.41.7.
And again, you can watch it live on Friday 20th of December on Twitch.

The Science Perl Journal, Issue #1 (Vol. 1, No. 1) is finally here!

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.

Slurp in Perl

Have you play with the new command line switch -g in Perl?

Please checkout this post for more information.

https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/slurp-in-perl

This week in PSC (171) | 2024-12-05

This week felt like a PSC reunion meeting. We extended invitations to join us for a discussion of the version change to a number of core contributors, and ended up joined by ex-PSC members Ricardo and Paul (Neil would have joined, but couldn’t make it).

There is skepticism but no strong opposition. The benefits are in some doubt, and resources to implement this will not come from core contributors. So we want to experiment on a branch to get a handle on feasibility and viability, which we hope will give us better data to evaluate the proposal and, we hope, allay any worries.

We also briefly discussed our intentions for the PPC process with Paul. We are thinking about an automatically generated status page on GitHub Pages.

[P5P posting of this summary]

German Perl/Raku Workshop 2025 in Munich - 12.05.2025-14.05.2025

(English below)

Hallo zusammen,

wir laden Euch herzlich ein zum Deutschen Perl/Raku Workshop 2025.

Der Workshop findet nächstes Jahr vom Montag 12. Mai bis
Mittwoch 14. Mai im Kolpinghaus in München statt.

Die Webseite und der Call for Papers sind bereits online. Wir freuen uns auf viele interessante Vorträge!

Über Unterstützung durch Sponsoren freuen wir uns immer. Wenn Ihr bzw. Eure Firma den Workshop unterstützen möchtet, wendet Euch gerne an uns. Wir finden gemeinsam sicher eine Möglichkeit!

Wenn Ihr Fragen an die Organisatoren habt, erreicht Ihr uns am besten direkt unter orga2025@german-perl-workshop.de .

Wir freuen uns auf Eure Teilnahme,
Max Maischein für die Organisatoren und Frankfurt.pm

Wir arbeiten noch an
Hotelempfehlungen und veröffentlichen diese auf der Webseite.

Hello everybody,

we cordially invite you to the German Perl/Raku Workshop 2025.

The workshop will take place next year from Monday 12 May to
Wednesday 14 May at the Kolpinghaus in Munich..

The website and the call for papers are already online. We are looking forward to many interesting presentations!

Perl Weekly Challenge 291: Poker Hand Rankings

These are some answers to the Week 291, Task 2, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

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 2: Poker Hand Rankings

A draw poker hand consists of 5 cards, drawn from a pack of 52: no jokers, no wild cards. An ace can rank either high or low.

Write a script to determine the following three things:

1. How many different 5-card hands can be dealt?

2. How many different hands of each of the 10 ranks can be dealt? See here for descriptions of the 10 ranks of Poker hands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_poker_hands#Hand-ranking_categories

3. Check then the numbers you get in step 2 by adding them together and showing that they're equal to the number you get in step 1.

Look in to Julia

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.)

This week in PSC (170) | 2024-11-28

All three of us attended.

  • We discussed the reactions to the Perl 42 proposal and how to reach consensus on it. We want to get a handle on the technical feasibility and also discuss more closely with the people who have doubts.
  • We reviewed Paul’s clarifications to PPC0027 (any and all) and replied on the PR.
  • We discussed the mismatch between the definition of the PPC process and how it has worked out in practice, and tried to come up with a refactoring. We want to request a review.
  • We looked at the release process and the release manager role. We are considering the idea of making the shepherding of the perldelta a separate ongoing responsibility.
  • We spent some time working on our own meeting structure in order to better perform our project management responsibilities.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Update TiddlyWikis

The Perl wiki has been renamed from Perl.html - which was too generic - to Perl.Wiki.html:
https://savage.net.au/misc/Perl.Wiki.html

The Mojolicious wiki is at:
https://savage.net.au/misc/Mojolicious.Wiki.html

The Debian wiki is at:
https://savage.net.au/misc/Debian.Wiki.html

The Personal Security wiki is at:
https://symboliciq.au/misc/Personal.Security.Wiki.html

(Not updated actually...) The Symbolic Language wiki is at:
https://symboliciq.au/misc/Symbolic.Language.Wiki.html

Understanding the Financials of The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF)

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.

finance1.png
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:

Revenue

Perl Weekly Challenge 291: Middle Index

These are some answers to the Week 291, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

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.

Example 1

This week in PSC (169) | 2024-11-21

Only Aristotle and Philippe this time.

  • 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.

[P5P posting of this summary]

London Perl & Raku Workshop 2024: 10 Days To Go

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.

Weather::OWM released on CPAN

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.

Perl Weekly Challenge 290: Luhn's Algorithm

These are some answers to the Week 290, Task 2, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

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 2: Luhn’s Algorithm

You are given a string $str containing digits (and possibly other characters which can be ignored). The last digit is the payload; consider it separately. Counting from the right, double the value of the first, third, etc. of the remaining digits.

For each value now greater than 9, sum its digits.

The correct check digit is that which, added to the sum of all values, would bring the total mod 10 to zero.

Return true if and only if the payload is equal to the correct check digit.

It was originally posted on reddit.

Example 1

This week in PSC (168) | 2024-11-15

Another extended meeting, which everyone attended. Here’s a summary:

  • We want to get actual implementation of TLS in core underway. Paul volunteered for some of it. We’ll email our plan to p5p, to get things started.
  • We talked about undef-aware equality operators. While the flags idea is tempting, we don’t think that there are enough useful flags to go down this route (what’s the use of stacking flags, if you only have one). If equ and === are added to Perl, we think the negative versions (neu and !==) should be added as well.
  • We had a quick version discussion. The document is almost ready.
  • We want to poke the PPC implementors again, to make sure we can have some of them available in the next version of Perl.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Multiple Inheritance vs Role

https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/mi-vs-role

London Perl & Raku Workshop 2024 Gold Sponsor: CV-Library

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.

cvl.png

Since its founding in 2000, CV-Library has relied on Perl as the backbone of its core operations. Today, as the UK’s leading independent job board, we host over 150,000 job postings and maintain a database of more than 20 million CVs.

For nearly 25 years, CV-Library has been a committed supporter of LPW and the Perl community. We're proud to reaffirm this dedication at the 2024 conference.

Our platform now integrates modern Perl with Go, leveraging Kubernetes for scalable deployments, alongside other cutting-edge technologies to ensure stability and reliability.

Our development team consistently delivers high-quality features through code reviews, automated tests, and continuous deployment. Additionally, we regularly contribute to free and open-source projects, including CPAN.

CV-Library offers remote opportunities for developers and testers at all levels. We encourage participation in community meetups and collaboration days. Feel free to introduce yourself to Mark or any member of our team at the event, or explore our current job openings here.

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