blogs.perl.org

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.

Every week, I work with about a dozen SQL databases. Some are Sybase, some MySQL, some SQLite. Some have different versions in dev, staging, and production. All of them need data extracted, transformed, and loaded.

DBI is the clear choice for dealing with SQL databases in Perl, but there are a dozen lines of Perl code in between me and the operation that I want. Sure, I've got modules and web applications and ad-hoc commands and scripts that perform certain individual tasks on my databases, but sometimes those things don't quite do what I need right now, and I just want something that will let me execute whatever SQL I can come up with.

Yertl (ETL::Yertl) is a shell-based ETL framework. It's under development (as is all software), but included already is a small utility called ysql to make dealing with SQL databases easy.

You can generate your presentation slides programmatically with Perl 5 inside Docker container.

Source code example (left) and generate reveal.js slides (right) of my "Git (FS and DVCS)" course" presentation (full git-course-mj41 source code):

Already on GitHub github.com/mj41/prbuilder-docker. It's proof-of-concept but it worked well for me. Patches/pull requests welcome.

While I was focused on the social aspects of the PR Challenge, such as the IRC channel (opping literally everyone), the guides (wrote several), the repo (plus organization), and lately even a small parser for the web page Neil created (which will appear in another post), I still had my own responsibilities - mainly, my own PR challenge, and taking care of others' PR challenge contributions that fell under my purview.

I gave this talk about Automated Scoring Systems at MadMongers last week. This is part of the new crowd funding system we launched at The Game Crafter this week.

[From my blog.]

Hello,

As Neil categorized it in the title of this post, My first PR Challenge ( Poe::Component::DirWatch ) was definitely short , sweet and packed with value. When I attempted to work on this module I didn't find any issues to work on via the bug list. This lead me to jump into the PR Challenge irc chat where I got help from rjbs and ether on what I can do to submit my first pull request for this module. Of course the obvious answer was "Use the module" but while in the chat room rjbs did point out a bug ( documented here Moose::Classes ) that I ( without much experience on Moose) would not have been able to point out right away. After knowing this, I read some more Moose documentation and worked on my PR Challenge code .

This PR Challenge allow me to learn about Moose, namespace::clean and Test::CleanNamespaces ( The last 2 modules seem to be a better solution for my PR but I haven't installed the modules yet ) .

Thanks to everyone who pointed me in the right direction for my first PR Challenge.

Happy New Year!..

Oh my bad! I missed to post here that I made a Grant proposal.

It often happens. It obviously happens so obviously often during the last 15-20 years that the other day a guy (C# programmer) on Facebook commented: "CMS in Perl?!? "It will scale with your business" hahahaha". We obviously miss to say explicitly obvious things.

Yes, he does not know this is just a "Piece of cake" for us. Yes, it is so much "Piece of of cake" that almost nobody in the Perl community bothers to do it. Yeah, we have CPAN, we have CPANTESTERS, We have tied variables that some languages find very cool and trendy, and we even find them old fashioned, We are modern, we have Mo /o /se, ORMs and all the stuff, BUT "We suck at marketing".