blogs.perl.org

As if Perl programmers don't have an inferiority complex already, Amazon looks like it is adding Go to it's list of supported SDKs, having dropped (more or less) Perl quite a while ago for most of it's services.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/02/aws_going_googles_way/

The next stable release of Moo will be version 2.0, and will include some incompatible changes. These changes should affect a pretty small number of modules, and may help point out flaws in the existing code.

The most important change in Moo 2.0 is that it will no longer be applying fatal warnings to classes using it. As Moo has grown to be more widely used on CPAN, it has become obvious that applying fatal warnings is usually unexpected or undesired by other authors, resulting in things like Moo::Lax, or people just avoiding Moo entirely. And authors who prefer fatal warnings can easily apply them to their own code.

Moo 2.0 will also detect a number of cases where people apply modifiers to constructors, or attempt to add attributes to classes that have already been instantiated. These cases never worked correctly, but they will now issue errors.

Last week the website for the upcoming YAPC Europe in Granada was launched. You can already register and submit talk proposals. If you plan to be a sponsor for the conference, please take a look at the sponsorship proposal.

On the other hand, we're very pleased to announce that Larry and Gloria accepted our invitation to come to Granada in September. We hope we'll see you there, too.

By now you've heard the announcement that the Perl 6 team is cautiously hopeful that Perl 6.0.0 will be released this year. There are three things they need to finish:

• The Great List Refactor (which should improve performance)
• Native Shaped Arrays (tell Perl 6 that you only have 10 elements and you'll get an exception if you add more)
• Normalized Form Graphemes (solves some issues with combining characters in Unicode, such as the little-known "tapeworm operator" "\x{1F4A9}\x{0327}")

With those, Perl 6 will truly be born. Of course, it will need better documentation, tooling support, better modules, and so on.

From what I can see, Perl 6 actually has a chance to take off and there's one delightful little feature that I want to talk about.

My company is dusting off some job descriptions and considering expanding our team, which got me thinking of a blog post I’ve been meaning to write. Hiring developers can be tricky business, so I wanted to share some practices that have both worked well for me as a candidate and hiring manager. But first…

A Little Story

In the not too distant past, I found myself attracted to a fairly new company with a veritable A-list of Perl developers. After being declined, I was offered some feedback by the hiring manager which I gladly took the opportunity to hear:

Originally, I was assigned TryCatch. “At least something I can use,” I thought. Also, the module's ticket queue was 21 issues long, so there should've been something to pick up. When I took a closer look, though, I discovered the module was XS heavy (I have never written any XS, and almost no C either), and the only issue I would've been able to work on was “Mark as deprecated” — but I wasn't sure I'm able to judge whether it would be the right thing to do.

Get Ready to Party!
Larry Wall

If you are reading this and you didn't hear that Larry bit the bullet, rolled the dice, flipped the coin, shattered the space time continuum...breathe... then you really are going to get a shock.

Larry has announced that the Perl 6 Developers will attempt to make a development release of Version 1.0 of Perl 6.0 in time for his 61st Birthday this year and a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015.

So why do I say attempt?
Well it isn't as easy as promising, because we have a real issue if we do such a damn fool thing. There are a number of reasons, aside from the hidden complexities of code, that could scupper the plans. The inevitable bus-in-the-face failure being just one of them. A cautious 'Murphy doth exist' attitude is the right one to take.

Recovering passwords and convenience links are easy with Bedrock...

http://openbedrock.blogspot.com/2015/02/cookieless-sessions-automatically-login.html

Docs: Text::Table::Manifold.

clpm is designed to make managing sets of files easier at the Unix command line. It's free and open source. Please view the demo here. Find more info at http://tinypig.com/clpm

We are excited to announce Swiss Perl Workshop 2015.
Join us in Olten, Friday 28. and Saturday 29. August 2015.

For further information, please have a look at the workshop website.

Thanks to our sponsors:
www.oetiker.ch | www.perl-academy.de | www.bloonix.de | www.eventrix.ch

If you happen to be in Sydney Australia this month, please join us for a night of Perl and conversation.

SiteSuite have again offered to host us this month, thanks be to Cees Hek for setting the wheels in motion. Note: SiteSuite have moved, so check the new North Sydney address below!

What: Sydney PM
Date: Tuesday, 10th February 2015
Time: 6-9:30pm
Where: SiteSuite, Suite 202, 53 Walker St North Sydney

Speakers are needed!

Here are some ideas:

• perlprew, perlcritic, perltidy, podweaver, any of these sorts of tools
• Anything related to Mojolicious/Catalyst/Dancer
• Anything to do with rapid creation or consumption of rest/soap/xmlrpc/other apis
• Getting started on perl testing
• Queue things like beanstalkd, gearman
• Using perl in funky cloud services like digitial ocean, codio, heroku etc
• Maybe something on logging, log4perl, Log::Any, Log::Dispatch
• Something cool that you did, just a fun little tool or something

There is a projector with all the usual trimmings and wifi access may be available.

Lightning talks would also be really great!

Meeting after that?

At this weeks meeting, everyone seemed happy to plan for the month after as well. So if you can't make this month - look out for March!

Questions are best sent to the Sydney-PM email list.

So far I've found:

I've moved the "perlito" perl5 to perl6 compiler to a new home:
http://www.perlito.org/perlito/perlito5to6.html

• scalar(@a) is @a.elems
• $a[-1] is @a[*-1]
• fix "map" syntax
• eval-string is EVAL

I recently gave a talk at AmsterdamX.pm about web scraping. I provided a few examples of scraping (most of them on my Github repo), and amongst them, a few relating to the January assignments page Neil has put up.

In my quest to clean up my CPAN distributions and to normalize them, I've been working on CPAN::Critic, my unreleased tool that looks at my directory and complains about things I don't like. That's going nicely for the most part, but I ran into a small problem that's taken me down a bit of a rabbit hole of C++. All this in the same week I wrote a Python program.

I want to check that the minimum version of Perl the code requires is the same as the MIN_PERL_VERSION. We have two modules to do that, the PPI-based Perl::MinimumVersion and the Compiler::Lexer-based Perl::MinimumVersion::Fast.

However, I'm in love with postfix dereferencing, a v5.20 feature. PPI reports 5.004 and Compiler::Lexer thinks 5.008 because neither handle the latest syntax enhancements:

At YAPC::NA 2014 I talked about FFI and Perl. FFI is an alternative to XS that I think is worthy of consideration. My talk was well attended, I think primarily because I jokingly subtitled my talk "Never Need To Write XS Again". So there is a market for this idea. I mostly talked about FFI::Raw, which was a great way to experiment with FFI and to write real live CPAN modules with FFI right then and there. The question of performance inevitably came up, so at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop last year I talked about that.

The Perl Quality Assurance Hackathon (hereafter QAH) is an annual 4-day gathering of the people who work on the core CPAN toolchain and associated systems & services. This gives them dedicated time to work on these systems together, solving hard problems and working out how to move everything forward.

Like pretty much everything in the Perl world, these are all volunteers, so our approach is to get sponsorship to cover expenses (travel, accommodation, working space, meals) for as much of the gathering as possible. If your company relies on Perl, ask yourself how much you rely on the toolchain working smoothly? Perhaps you could persuade someone to sponsor the QAH this year?

The CPAN toolchain isn't glamorous, so generally doesn't get much press, but it's an essential part of our world. So over the next few weeks we'll be posting some short articles to raise awareness and hopefully encourage some sponsorship.

In the previous post I discussed my January Pull Request Challenge contribution. It's only part 1 because there's another part: the contributions others made during their PRC which were related to projects I'm in charge of.

I just noticed on the SLC-PM Facebook that the OpenWest Conference 2015 has called for Papers.

Last year it had a whole track for Perl topics. The content was excellent and can be viewed on YouTube.

And since I am posting stuff from their Facebook page, here is a talk from last months SLC-PM meeting.