This article on the Python Software Foundation inspired me to write this. Serving on the board of a foundation isn't all about glamorous meetings and fancy titles. Still, I'd like to share how I ended up here and what I've learned along the way. Opinions are my own.
What Exactly is TPF?
TPF stands for The Perl Foundation, a U.S.-based non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the Perl language through open discussion, collaboration, and, of course, code.
TPF got its start around 2001 when Perl was super popular. The organization was originally needed to run a conference; because apparently, you need an official entity to book conference venues. The foundation was also actively raising funds and spending money on Perl development grants at that time, and they've been doing it ever since.
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.
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.
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 virtual Conference on December 18th, 2024 is being called in conjunction with the creation of the Science Perl Journal, Winter 2024 Issue.
We have 6 author committments from some very exciting topics, but we want more! The Summer Issue has 8 authors and is nearly 150 pages. We are looking to double the number of authors, doubling the number of pages is going to be a stretch :-).
DESCRIPTION
Christos Argyropoulos, MD, PhD. is our moderator for this virtual event, which is December 18th, 2024 - Perl's 37th birthday! At this event we will be announcing our Summer 2025 plans, which will include a 3rd Issue of the SPJ.
The following lengths will be accepted for publication and presentation:
This week’s meeting was delayed by scheduling conflicts because we chose consistency and availability over partition tolerance. We spent the entire meeting working on the document we wanted to put together a month ago with our thoughts on the Perl version number, which we intend to publish very soon.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 22, 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: Valid Number
You are given a string, $str.
Write a script to find if it is a valid number.
Conditions for a valid number:
- An integer number followed by an optional exponent.
- A decimal number followed by an optional exponent.
- An integer number is defined with an optional sign '-' or '+' followed by digits.
Decimal Number:
A decimal number is defined with an optional sign '-' or '+' followed by one of the following definitions:
- Digits followed by a dot '.'.
- Digits followed by a dot '.' followed by digits.
- A dot '.' followed by digits.
The schedule for this year's London Perl & Raku Workshop is now visible: https://act.yapc.eu/lpw2024/schedule. Please please please (please please) make a point to mark those talks that you plan to attend as this will allow us to tweak the schedule a bit if some talks are more heavily favourited than others.
The venue opens for attendees at 9am and we plan to start talks at 9:30am. Drinks will be available throughout the day, hence no need to have dedicated breaks there. Lunch will be at midday for an hour, there are plenty of options close to the venue to grab something to eat. If we receive a couple more sponsors we can have lunch at the venue, but currently that won't be possible.
There are a couple of spots left for talks, otherwise the schedule is full. Please don't let this put you off submitting a talk as it's possible some speakers may have to change their plan.
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.
The following script leaks memory in perl v5.40, and it did not in v5.38:
use Scalar::Util 'weaken';
my $z;
{
my $x;
my $y;
my sub my_sub {
$x = shift;
return sub { $y };
};
my $subscriber = {};
$subscriber->{foo} = my_sub($subscriber);
weaken($z = $subscriber);
}
say 'leak = ', int defined $z;
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.
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.
Just Aristotle and Philippe this time (Graham chipped in on IRC):
we discussed the apostrophe situation: we will watch 5.41.3 break CPAN, and then evaluate the actual fallout. We like the idea of guarding this with a feature (which might need to be split in two, for the string interpolation case)
we had a long discussion about backwards compatibility and use VERSION.
Should "did you use VERSION?" become the new "did you use strict and warnings?"
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on August 25, 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: Unique Number
You are given an array of integers, @ints, where every element appears more than once except one element.
`
Write a script to find the one element that appears exactly one time.
It prompted me to take a serious look at the modules I have uploaded to CPAN and acknowledge that some of them are no longer valuable. Indeed as I reviewed one of them I was none too kind in my judgements against the author.
That made it quite easy for me to see how I can easily participate in CPAN day. I'm removing a couple of modules:
Business::Worldpay::Junior - I don't think this integration option even exists any more and I certainly haven't actively maintained this for years.
Net::UKDomain::Nominet::Automaton - Nominet withdrew the Automaton in 2015
Those are now scheduled for deletion on Monday next week.
I'll need to review some of the others and consider whether to open them up for anyone who is interested to take over as maintainer.
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 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:
Sometimes the unexpected happens and must be shared with the world … this one is such a case.
Recently, I’ve started experimenting with Perl for workflow management and high-level supervision of low level code for data science applications. A role I’d reserve for Perl in this context is that of lifecycle management of memory buffers, using the Perl application to “allocate” memory buffers and shuttle it between computing components written in C, Assembly, Fortran and the best hidden gem of the Perl world, the Perl Data Language.
There at least 3 ways that Perl can be used to allocate memory buffers:
