This week in PSC (113) | 2023-08-24

The three of us met today, and we:

  • updated the status of stalled PPCs (after discussion with the proposers)
  • assigned a number (0023) to the map my $x { } PPC
  • discussed the evaluation order issue related to PPC 0021 (optional chaining)
  • decided that future rejected PPCs should have a section that details why they were rejected
  • discussed the tooling around the publication of dual-life modules on CPAN

TPRC Toronto Part 2

Well end of day two here and had a nice walk and a nice chat with one of the local city counselors who was out glad handing I asked her when the Gardiner Express Way will be fixed up. She said by Christmas ;)

That was a Local joke now onto what I got up to today.

Ovid despite Air Frances best efforts actually did make in to the conference late the night before so he was able to give his Keynote on OO in the Perl Core, Seems we will be getting something called Corinna Soon we will have Field, Class, Role and Method to play with and if you are brave you can get the latest version of perl and play with a few parts of it. The key sticky part is Typing, Seems there is another project out there called Oshum to handle all those nasty typing problems. Well to quote the main character Sweden's best know literature

'We shall see, what we shall see'

Perl Weekly Challenge 264: Target Array

These are some answers to the Week 264, 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 April 14, 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: Target Array

You are given two arrays of integers, @source and @indices. The @indices can only contains integers 0 <= i < size of @source.

Write a script to create target array by insert at index $indices[i] the value $source[i].

Example 1

Support TPRF with Perl 5.38 swag purchases

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Shirts and hoodies are available in variety of colours, sizes and styles. Stickers, mugs, and phone covers are also all available. With proceeds from sales funding The Perl and Raku Foundation.

Buy from https://the-perl-store.creator-spring.com/

This week in PSC (112) | 2023-08-17

This week, for its first meeting, the new PSC:

  • discussed the nature of typing systems for Perl and what properties we find desirable vs not
  • worked out a release schedule for the next few months of devel releases
  • reviewed the PPC Tracker document. A few are now done, the rest need remainder nudge emails to their respective proposers

Perl Weekly Challenge #224 - Passing Notes

Hi everybody! Just doing one challenge again this week. Time limitations hold me back once again.

This week we're looking for the letters of a target word in a source word, and we're not allowed to use the same letter twice. Spoiler alert because it's only Wednesday and you still have the rest of the week to submit solutions if desired.

The easiest way to do this is with a dictionary hash initialized like so:

foreach (split //, $source) {$chars{$_}++}

Many people use map() to do this, but I'm not a big fan of map in many cases because I feel it makes code less readable.

This gives us the number of occurrences of each letter in the original word.

Then we iterate through the target word and look for (and remove) the letters in the dictionary:

Perl Weekly Challenge 264: Greatest English Letter

These are some answers to the Week 264, 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 April 14, 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: Greatest English Letter

You are given a string, $str, made up of only alphabetic characters [a..zA..Z].

Write a script to return the greatest english letter in the given string.

A letter is greatest if it occurs as lower and upper case. Also letter ‘b’ is greater than ‘a’ if ‘b’ appears after ‘a’ in the English alphabet.

Example 1

Faster and up to date HTTP Cookie Jar

Hot off the keyboard, is HTTP::State in trial form anyway. This is HTTP cookie jar supporting public suffix, same site, cookie partitioning and other goodies from RFC6265bis-draft and CHIPS. It makes cookie handling on the client side more in line with recent developments in browsers (browsing context, first-party partitioning etc).

While most of 'browsing context' and partitioning features are not directly usable in current Perl HTTP user agents, it eases the path for better cookie support in new/updated user agents.

In the mean time, a compatibility API allows drop in usage where ever HTTP::CookieJar is used. The main benefit for current user agents is a significant boost in cookie retrieval performance.

It is a trial of a first release, so probably has some teething issues and is currently limited v5.36.0 min perl. However if you want to give it a try, please do and give feedback if you can!

SQL::Inserter for faster/multi-row inserting

SQL::Inserter is new CPAN module based on what we are using at SpareRoom to easily manage buffered inserts, as well as to replace SQL::Abstract's slow insert method.

Inserter OO interface

The idea is that if you want to insert many rows of data (e.g. part of an ETL pipeline, or writing logs etc), you'd want to be doing that with multi-row INSERT statements. With SQL::Inserter you create a very lightweight object to handle inserting for you, just pass it a DBI db handle, the table name and the columns you'll be inserting (optional if you use hashes for inserting, see next section):

Perl Weekly Challenge #223 - Count Primes? I've Never Met the Man

Hello everybody! It's another week with a new Perl Weekly Challenge. This week I'm only doing the first challenge, not because of time, but because the second challenge makes absolutely no sense to me. Perhaps a clarification will come out, but I'm not going to bother at the moment.

This week the challenge is to find the number of primes under the provided number. This is a challenge that really isn't worth rebuilding, and so I would recommend using Math::Prime::Util. You have to know when to just trust the professionals and use modules. With the use of M::P::U, we can essentially do the challenge in one line.

use Math::Prime::Util 'primes';
say scalar @{primes(shift)};

primes() returns an array reference, so we have to dereference the array after calling the function. We shift the number that is entered, call primes (which provides an array of the primes under that number), and dereference it and count it to print the answer.

It's that simple! This is a case where I definitely wouldn't recommend writing your own custom prime finder. I'll hopefully see you next week with the next challenge!

Perl Weekly Challenge 263: Merge Items

These are some answers to the Week 263, 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 April 7, 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: Merge Items

You are given two 2-D array of positive integers, $items1 and $items2 where element is pair of (item_id, item_quantity).

Write a script to return the merged items.

Example 1

Celebrate Perl 5.38 with Limited Edition merch!

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To celebrate the upcoming release of Perl 5.38 we are excited to offer Limited Edition* merchandise.

The design was a true team effort by the marketing committee and is inspired by the traditional Perl camel logo. We had a lot of fun throwing around ideas, then throwing them in to AI to see what it's randomness would come back with. We then passed the ideas to our artist for the final result.

Check them out on the official Perl store where proceeds go to The Perl and Raku Foundation which then directly fund grants etc.

* TBD how limited.

Profiling Perl under Apache

At SpareRoom we still use Apache/mod_perl and, despite Devel::NYTProf::Apache's warnings about it not being maintained, it is still the best way for profiling Perl.

All you need to do really, for a mod_perl app, is to include this in your Apache config:

PerlPassEnv NYTPROF # Not needed for default settings.
PerlModule Devel::NYTProf::Apache

You should also allow a single worker/child, and make sure it terminates cleanly before processing the output (nytprofhtml).

Since I want my dev/test environments to normally run with multiple workers and no profiler attached, I have a bash alias that exits apache and restarts it set-up for profiling. I thought I'd share an example of that, as I find it very useful.

First, a basic example pulled from what I used on our older CentOS/RedHat VM:

“Let Maintainers Be Maintainers”

Graydon Hoare:

[…] Corporate-employed FOSS maintainers working at a firm with these [very common] “growth and novelty” incentives [… are] in a position where their job performance is very likely to be evaluated in terms of visible growth and novelty (it might be dressed up in more abstract terms like “real-world impact” or “visibility” but it still means the same thing) even though that is exactly the wrong thing for the health of the project they’re maintaining.

I’m excerpting the gist of his article here but actually I suggest reading all of it. It’s not very long but gives flesh to this skeleton argument.

It doesn’t help that what he is talking about isn’t limited to employed maintainers; profit is not the only growth incentive structure that can lead to this novelty mindset, so this can exist entirely outside commercial context.

Perl Weekly Challenge 263: Target Index

These are some answers to the Week 263, 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 April 7, 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: Target Index

You are given an array of integers, @ints and a target element $k.

Write a script to return the list of indices in the sorted array where the element is same as the given target element.

Example 1

Input: @ints = (1, 5, 3, 2, 4, 2), $k = 2
Output: (1, 2)

Sorted array: (1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Target indices: (1, 2) as $ints[1] = 2 and $k[2] = 2

Example 2

TWC 220: Squared Shoulders

In which we move beyond Perfect Permutation.

Perl Weekly Challenge #220 - I've Seen These Characters 'Round These Parts

Hi everybody, just a quick one this week. Again it's been a very busy week, so I wrote this one quick to print the sorted list of all common characters in all the words provided. That's the simple explanation of this week's challenge.

Here's the code:

my @results;
my $first_word = shift;
for my $letter (split(//, $first_word)) {
    push(@results, lc($letter)) if (grep {$_ =~ /$letter/i} @ARGV) == @ARGV;
}
@results = sort @results;
say $_ foreach @results;

This week in PSC (109) | 2023-06-09

Today’s PSC call was another pretty short one.

  • We agreed on the change HTTP::Tiny, our last blocker, and hope to have RC1 tomorrow.
  • There are a few minor notes on the RC0 status on p5p, which need addressing. Nothing major.
  • We discussed the things we need to do to arrange the next PSC election, scheduled for post-v5.38.0.
  • We discussed libperl.t, which fails on newest macOS+Xcode even in stable. It’s fixed in blead, and we should fix maint-5.36, too

Perl Weekly Challenge 262: Count Equal Divisible

These are some answers to the Week 262, 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 March 31, 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: Count Equal Divisible

You are given an array of integers, @ints and an integer $k.

Write a script to return the number of pairs (i, j) where

a) 0 <= i < j < size of @ints

b) ints[i] == ints[j]

c) i x j is divisible by k

Example 1

Well Back in the Saddle again.

Finally have a chance to go to a North American Perl event, so after nearly 4 years since my last Perl event, thanks Covid 19 I managed to make my way down from the Ivory Tower in Ottawa to the 'Big Smoke', 'Hogtown', Queen City, TO or as most of the rest of the world knows it Toronto.

So there are about 100 us us Perl types here today, with most participants coming from across the US and Canada but there are a few that came over 'The Big Pond'

So far The talks have been very good, I had a and interesting Talk on Test2 by Chad Granum something I will have to look into as my old test suite is becoming a little flimsy and is a patchwork of kludges,

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