This year's London Perl and Raku Workshop is just 4 weeks away. We now have a pretty full schedule, so the call for presentations is now closed, however we might have room for one or two more talks depending circumstances on the day. If you really think you have talk you want to give then get in touch.
As part of the workshop we would like to ask attendees if any are willing to volunteer for helping out on the day. This will likely include:
Room monitoring and video equipment operation
Registration of attendees
General assistance of organisers and attendees
We are probably looking for three people to help out on the day. Please contact the organisers if you would like to help out.
The London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Thanks to this year's sponsors, without whom LPW would not happen:
We rehashed the Perl version number discussion from last meeting now that we are all present. We will put together a document with our thoughts on this.
We will create a GitHub issue to make apostrophe removal feature-guarded.
Smartmatch (not so surprisingly) turns out to be too big to fail. Given its unique history, we are considering options for how to proceed with it in a more gradual way without giving up on the deprecation.
Regarding open undef (GH #22490), we agreed that Perl should support undef as a value and not just as a literal for the filename (and warn for the useless modes)
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.
Hi All! Given the number of talks submitted to this year's London Perl & Raku Workshop we have decided to reserve a third room in the venue. This will give us a bit more room on the schedule for talks, which is good as the other two rooms are now 90% full.
However, we would also like to use this third room for something else. Its capacity is relatively low, 15 people including the person presenting, so we feel it might be suitable for use as a breakout room / mini hackathon(s) / birds of a feather; and we will probably reserve two large slots for this. If you have an idea of something you'd like to use the room for then please get in touch with us.
Another way we can make more space for talks is to opt for lunch at the venue, this will free up space for three more talks. To do that we need a couple more sponsors so if you would like to help with that then please have a look at the options here: https://act.yapc.eu/lpw2024/sponsoring.html
The London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Thanks to this year's sponsors, without whom LPW would not happen:
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.
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:
xe.com is a well known site for calculating the exchange value between the currencies of the world. However, there are times I’d prefer to query it from the command line. They have an API, but it’s not free, so I ended up writing a quick and dirty script that scrapes the web page and uses regexps to extract the data.
I know you’re not supposed to parse HTML with regexps, but sometimes, you can get away with it for a while. Also, this script is not that serious, so it can fail without hurting anything.
All present, and this time the meeting actually ended on time.
We discussed the situation with the apostrophe package separator removal. We continue to keep an eye on things but it now feels close to inevitable that we will use a feature to disable it conditionally.
We briefly touched on the removal of smartmatch, where both the extent of the situation and our thoughts so far are much less clear.
Connected to all that, we discussed some general thoughts on how not to keep finding ourselves in the same situation with changes like this, but found we probably already have all the mechanisms we need.
We decided that the provisions of the PPC process are the right way for pre-PPC “Signature named parameters” to play out so it has now become PPC 0024 with status “Exploratory”.
We took another brief look at the closure memory leak which is now #22547 and resolved to prepare to put down a consensus next time we meet.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on August 18, 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: Changing Keys
You are given an alphabetic string, $str, as typed by user.
Write a script to find the number of times user had to change the key to type the given string. Changing key is defined as using a key different from the last used key. The shift and caps lock keys won’t be counted.
Yep, that's right - the first dozen talks have been accepted for this year's London Perl and Raku Workshop. This puts our schedule at approximately 50% full, so if you are thinking about talking at the workshop then submit your proposal now!
If you aren't thinking about talking then have a think about what you've been doing in the Perl and/or Raku space the last five years, or even just the general IT and development space. Perhaps there's something interesting you can talk about? If you don't feel it's a full fat talk then submit a lightning talk instead.
The London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Thanks to this year's sponsors, without whom LPW would not happen:
We discussed the recently reported closure memory leak in 5.40, which existed in older perls and was fixed in a way that caused other breakage instead, and we agreed that if it isn’t fixable we need to address it by at least providing guidance on how to code around it
We discussed the removal of apostrophe as a package separator, and agreed that it should likely be feature-guarded, but the verdict on the fallout is not yet in
We continued the discussion on how to simultaneously encourage low ecosystem churn while helping users enjoy all the latest goodies
We agreed on writing a few position paper articles to explain our thinking and the attitude we think a PSC should take
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on July 28, 2024 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
Task 2: Split String
You are given a string, $str.
Write a script to split the given string into two containing exactly same number of vowels and return true if you can otherwise false.
Example 1
Input: $str = "perl"
Ouput: false
Example 2
Input: $str = "book"
Ouput: true
Two possible strings "bo" and "ok" containing exactly one vowel each.
I created a function in Perl called pg_dt, that will convert PostgreSQL’s datetime values into Perl’s DateTime values and vice versa. This is useful both when you want to store DateTime values into the database, or want to convert the pg datetime/timestamp value from the database into a DateTime object value that Perl can use.
I really can’t seem to include code blocks in my posts on this platform (tried Preview with Markdown and Markdown With SmartyPants without success), so you can read the rest of this article on my blog.
Yep, that's right - the second half dozen talks have been accepted for this year's London Perl and Raku Workshop. This puts our schedule at approximately 80% full, so if you are thinking about talking at the workshop then submit your proposal now!
The CFP will be closed at the end of September to give speakers sufficient time to finish their presentations and to allow the schedule to be created. We encourage all attendees to mark talks they are interested in as that will inform some of the schedule choices.
If you aren't thinking about talking then have a think about what you've been doing in the Perl and/or Raku space the last five years, or even just the general IT and development space. Perhaps there's something interesting you can talk about? If you don't feel it's a full fat talk then submit a lightning talk instead.
The London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Thanks to this year's sponsors, without whom LPW would not happen:
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 1: Third Maximum
You are given an array of integers, @ints.
Write a script to find the third distinct maximum in the given array. If third maximum doesn’t exist then return the maximum number.
Example 1
Input: @ints = (5, 6, 4, 1)
Output: 4
The first distinct maximum is 6.
The second distinct maximum is 5.
The third distinct maximum is 4.
The Dancer Core Team is happy to announce that Dancer2 1.1.1 is on its way to CPAN. This is a maintenance release that deals with the following issues:
[ BUG FIXES ]
* GH #1712: Fix use of send_as in templates (Andy Beverley)
[ DOCUMENTATION ]
* PR #1706: Document missing logging hooks and log format option;
fix typo in logging test (Jason A. Crome)
