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, starting with our diamond sponsor:
Deriv, a leading online broker with 25 years in the industry, is proud to sponsor the London Perl & Raku Workshop 2024.
As a company with strong ties to the Open Source community, our connection to Perl is more than just practical—it's a passion. Over the years, we have actively used Modern Perl and contributed to shaping its future, including beta testing key developments like Object::Pad, which are crucial for advancing the language's capabilities.
Perl is the backbone of our back-end operations, proving to be a robust, reliable, and versatile language that meets our needs. Its community-driven growth, notably through CPAN, continually boosts its capabilities and reflects our values of collaboration and innovation.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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
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;
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 1: Strong Password
You are given a string, $str.
Write a program to return the minimum number of steps required to make the given string very strong password. If it is already strong then return 0.
Criteria:
- It must have at least 6 characters.
- It must contain at least one lowercase letter, at least one upper case letter and at least one digit.
- It shouldn't contain 3 repeating characters in a row.
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:
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.
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:
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 15, 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: Order Game
You are given an array of integers, @ints, whose length is a power of 2.
Write a script to play the order game (min and max) and return the last element.
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.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 15, 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: Self Spammer
Write a program which outputs one word of its own script / source code at random. A word is anything between whitespace, including symbols.
Example 1
If the source code contains a line such as: 'open my $fh, "<", "ch-1.pl" or die;'
then the program would output each of the words { open, my, $fh,, "<",, "ch-1.pl", or, die; }
(along with other words in the source) with some positive probability.
Example 2
Technically 'print(" hello ");' is *not* an example program, because it does not
assign positive probability to the other two words in the script.
It will never display print(" or ");
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 devised a strategy to deal with smartmatch, starting with reverting its removal. A separate email with details will follow.
We spent too much time talking about putting the apostrophe package separator behind a feature. That too will be outlined in a separate email. A github issue will follow.
We want to revert the open undef patch, for a variety of reasons, such as breaking autodie. We decided the steps to handle this.
