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!

Registration is OPEN - Perl Community Conference, Winter 2024

The Perl Community Conference is a hybrid in-person-and-online event held on December 18th from 10:30a-4:30p CST. Perl's 37th birthday, featuring talks from the world's top Perl programmers and community members. Topics include artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, web applications, chemometrics, genetics, data science, high performance computing, ethics, and much more! Join our mailing list to receive the latest updates!

Sign Up:

https://www.meetup.com/austin-perl-mongers/events/304573306/

We have secured a location for anyone looking for a place to participate in person to be. At least 2 Conference talks will be given and streamed LIVE from this location.

See some of the many accomplishments of the Science Perl Committee in just the last year:

https://www.reddit.com/r/perlcommunity/comments/1gvtv7s/first_year_accomplishments_of_the_science_perl/

At the conclusion of this Conference, we will be announcing our exciting plans for Summer 2025 and future Issues of the Science Perl Journal. Full abstracts for current Issue are now available for free at the site.

Cheers,

Brett Estrade (OODLER)

Science Perl Committee Chairman

London Perl & Raku Workshop 2024: Quick Afterwords

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.

scarf.jpeg

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:

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]

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.

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

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.

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]

Perl Weekly Challenge 290: Double Exist

These are some answers to the Week 290, 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 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:

1) $i != $j
2) 0 <= ($i, $j) < scalar @ints
3) $ints[$i] == 2 * $ints[$j]

Example 1

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.

London Perl & Raku Workshop 2024 Gold Sponsor: Oleeo

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.

oleeo.png

Oleeo is an award-winning provider of innovative talent acquisition technology. Built using intelligent automation and machine learning, Oleeo’s platform helps companies discover unlimited sourcing potential to attract, engage and hire amazing, diverse teams that change the world for the better. Our mission is to help recruiters do that faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Utilise our intelligent automation to help secure exceptional talent with rapid time-to-hire. Enjoy the massive rewards experienced by our customers, including Marks & Spencer, Morgan Stanley, Metropolitan Police, Civil Service Resourcing, John Lewis Partnership. Benefit from our bespoke, prescriptive intelligence and pinpoint perfect candidates who can steer your business forwards at every level. We offer one complete talent acquisition system end-to-end: Attract, engage, monitor, interview, hire & onboard without any compromise on candidate quality.

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]

Perl Weekly Challenge 289: Jumbled Letters

These are some answers to the Week 289, 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 6, 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: Jumbled Letters

An Internet legend dating back to at least 2001 goes something like this:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Board Reflections: Continued Experiences with The Perl Foundation

Read volume 1 here.

In my last post, I talked about some of the big things TPF (The Perl Foundation) does. This time, I'll discuss some of the smaller stuff I've handled at TPF, often with help from others, and my misses along the way. My opinions are my own.

White Camel Awards

The White Camel Awards, started by brian d foy in 1999, were created to honor Perl community contributors, who, like ninjas, do all the hard work but never seem to get noticed. brian personally picked the winners each year until he stepped down in 2018. While many people contribute to the Perl community, their efforts often fly under the radar. I mean, organize a Perl event every year and your name still wouldn't make it outside the venue. Tough, right?

In 2022, I took over the award with TPF, with brian's blessing, to keep this tradition alive.

Cloud VM performance / price comparison 2024

I gave the talk Maximizing Performance and Cost Efficiency in the Cloud at the Perl and Raku conference this year. Among others, it used data from a benchmarking comparison I did among dozens of VMs on various cloud providers, and I had promised I'd post the full report.

It took me quite a bit longer than expected due to both technical complications and some new releases I wanted to include that enlarged the scope, but here it is now. Should be useful if you want to get the best bang for buck on the cloud.

This week in PSC (167) | 2024-11-07

The three of us attended another long meeting:

  • 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.

[P5P posting of this summary]

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.

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

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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