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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

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'

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:

In my recent Cloud Comparison, I mentioned that I'd look at Spot VM pricing in an update. This is the update - 6 out of the 10 providers tested offer Spot/Preemptible instance pricing.

At SpareRoom we make some good use of Spot VMs. E.g. our perl test suite gets to run on fast VM types at very low cost: currently we are using c3-highcpu-22 instances which normally come at $0.95/hour each. The spot pricing for them is more than 10x lower, at just $0.086/h. At these prices, if our test suite needed it (it's already fast), we'd be able to launch c3-highcpu-176 (176 vCPUs) at well under $1/h!

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

These are some answers to the Week 262, 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 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 1: Max Positive Negative

You are given an array of integers, @ints.

Write a script to return the maximum number of either positive or negative integers in the given array.

Example 1

Input: @ints = (-3, 1, 2, -1, 3, -2, 4)
Output: 4

Count of positive integers: 4
Count of negative integers: 3
Maximum of count of positive and negative integers: 4

Example 2

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.

In which we move beyond Perfect Permutation.

Today was PSC 111 — what happened to 110 you ask? Well, it was a bit of a non-meeting a few weeks ago. Nothing to say about it, sorry!

This week, we:

• Said hello to Graham and goodbye to Rik
• We did a bunch of handover, making sure we set up a new Zoom meeting and calendar, and talking about our usual order of business

In more normal business, we:

• talked about the future of use vX, especially related to builtin:: stuff — do we want “use v5.40” to import “builtin::refaddr” for example
• talked about what we’re going to do with the UNIVERSAL::import changes so we can move it forward toward someday making it fatal but without breaking half of CPAN at once

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,

Hi everybody! Very limited time this week so just a brief blog post.

This week we're looking for any words in the list that can be created only using letters from a dictionary string. Then print the number of characters in the good words.

Here's the code:

These are some answers to the Week 261, Task 2, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days from now (on March 24, 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: Multiply by Two

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

Write a script to do the following:

a) Look for $start in the array @ints, if found multiply the number by 2

b) If not found stop the process otherwise repeat

In the end return the final value.

Example 1

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

I've released MooseX::Extended 0.35 and it resolves a long-standing bug. If you tried to use multi subs, it would trigger this bug in Syntax::Keyword::MultiSub. To fix that, you had to manually patch the latter module:

--- old/lib/Syntax/Keyword/MultiSub.xs  2021-12-16 10:59:30 +0000
+++ new/lib/Syntax/Keyword/MultiSub.xs  2022-08-12 10:23:06 +0000
@@ -129,6 +129,7 @@
 redo:
     switch(o->op_type) {
       case OP_NEXTSTATE:
+      case OP_DBSTATE:
         o = o->op_next;
         goto redo;

Not good. However, Syntax::Keyword::MultiSub 0.03 has been released with that patch included, so that's a relief.

However, I was still struggling with switching WebService::OpenSky to MooseX::Extended but under the debugger, we have a serious problem.

Hi everybody! This week again because of time I only finished the first challenge of The Weekly Challenge. However, because work for my client requires Python, I'm busy learning Python and I thought "Why not do Python for a simple weekly challenge task?" This is the first Python code I've ever truly written and not just modified!

First, the Perl:

say $_ for (sort {$a <=> $b} (map {$_ * $_} @ARGV));

Yep, a one-liner. Normally I prefer to write longer, more readable code, but this time the task was so simple it made sense just to write it on one line.

We map each argument on the command line into its square, then sort (with a numerical sort because map defaults to strings) and then just say() them.

Originally I was sorting with a custom sort routine based on absolute values, but then I realized (thanks to other blog posts) that it would be more efficient not to abs() anything and just to replace everything with its square first, then sort.

These are some answers to the Week 261, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days from now (on March 24, 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: Element Digit Sum

You are given an array of integers, @ints.

Write a script to evaluate the absolute difference between element and digit sum of the given array.

Example 1

Input: @ints = (1,2,3,45)
Output: 36

Element Sum: 1 + 2 + 3 + 45 = 51
Digit Sum: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15
Absolute Difference: | 51 - 15 | = 36

Example 2

Four years have passed since the last Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS) in Marlow. I planned to continue working on PAUSE's web UI, but I didn't exactly remember what to do. So the first thing I did at home before the PTS was to read through the PAUSE issues and do some triage. I also resumed a virtual machine that held PAUSE clones I had worked on. There I found an untracked docker-compose.yml. It was incomplete. I must have given it up because I already had a working environment. However, I remembered a few people wanted an easier way to install PAUSE. It would be helpful if they could run PAUSE on docker. Thus I started filling missing parts of the YAML file. After making a few serious mistakes, I made a draft pull request on the first day of the PTS. Matthew Horsfall took it over then.

After skipping last week, Rik and BooK met today and we:

• happily confirmed there are no release blockers left
• looked at HTTP::Tiny, which might really be one last blocker
• reviewed the PPC list (see separate email)
• think we’re ready for RC1!

Hi everybody! Back this week with a solution to just the first challenge project. I know I won't have time for the second one, plus I'm not sure of an efficient solution. I really liked this first one, though! I got to try some new techniques in it.

Spoiler alert, since I know it's only Wednesday/Thursday depending on where you are, but if you're looking to solve this challenge yourself you might prefer not to read this yet.

So the goal of the first challenge is to find the 3 integers in a list that have the greatest product, and print the product.

First, here's the code as usual:

These are some answers to the Week 258, Task 2, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days from now (on March 3, 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: Sum of Values

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

Write a script to find the sum of values whose index binary representation has exactly $k number of 1-bit set.

Example 1