As you may know, Perl 5.14 (and up) will allow you to use references for container functions (by which they mean functions such as push or keys that operate directly on arrays or hashes). I’d never thought much about this feature, except to think that it was, in general, a nice way to save three keystrokes on constructs such as (to steal an example from perldelta):
keys %{$hoh->{genres}{artists}}
Now, saving three keystrokes doesn’t mean much if it makes your code harder to read. But, in this case
keys $hoh->{genres}{artists}
is actually
easier
to read, so I call that a win-win.
I’ve released SimpleDB::Client 1.0600 to CPAN. SimpleDB::Client is used to connect to Amazon SimpleDB. The only new thing in this release is a command line app called “simpledb” contributed by Andrew Solomon.
A few weeks ago, to the encouragement of Jeffrey Thalhammer,
I contacted the Chief editor of The ChangeLog and offered to write Perl-related articles. He agreed, and since then I managed to post 3 articles. They were about GitPrep, Questhub, and Sqitch.
For now my main focus is to show applications written in Perl that can be used by anyone, even if they are not programmers. Tools that solve problems even non-Perl programmers can have.
Another quick update. We're in the middle of communicating to our (possible) sponsors. Lots of paperwork to do :)
As I already wrote on Hannover.pm gathering v21 (German) we're planing to announce the approximate ticket price within the next weeks. The final ticket price will be available in January 2014 at the latest.
This week I spent some time to fix the remaining p2 parser problems. I set my first goal to parse 50% of perl5 syntax by summer 2013.
I want to show some real code and benchmarks at the upcoming YAPC::Asia in Tokyo.
After the YAPC::EU in Kiev I first spent some time fixing B::C for 5.16, 5.18 and blead (PADLIST, COW and bytecode compiler regressions).
In the meantime my partner in crime goccy in Tokyo made progress with his parser, compiler and the new llvm backend.
His parser is hand-written and I'm still fighting with greg, but my code is still much smaller and more elegant.
Thanks to some pointers by MidLifeXis and Ether it turns out I didn’t need to bump the requirements of Ouch to 5.12 to use overload and parent. Thanks! So this release just goes back to letting you use 5.8 (but you really should upgrade!)
Last night, I gave a presentation for the Madison Perl Mongers group on UAV::Pilot. The video is now up:
This is also the announcement for the WumpusUAV Indiegogo project, which aims to create a new, cheap, hackable UAV platform. More information is on WumpusUAV.com.
In the previous post, we talked about some of the optimizations
that perl performs when conducting string and array operations. This time, we'll be diving into
how perl implements hashes. But first, a brief clarification…
We have released a new version of Brainturk.com . We have changed the look of the application and now have 35 games and most of the games have different levels.
Let's post information about your production and your work to blog. It is important to inform your production and work even if it is not complete. Other people can know your idea, your technique, and your concern.
Even if it is good production, if no one know it, no one use. To spread good production from person to person, we need good communication. blog is good place to inform your production, your module, your work, your application.
Blog is public, rapid, understandable communication compare with face book, twitter, IRC, mailing list.
I think Perl culture is close to IRC and mailing list, compared with Ruby, Python, PHP. I think Perl need more web, more public information.
Continuing my series on underappreciated Perl modules, I introduce Tree::Trie. A Like Hashes, a Trie is a type of dictionary lookup. Unlike Hashes, Tries naturally support sorted return of keys and prefix matching, all while still being fast, even with a million entries.
Maxim Yemelyanov pointed me to this post comparing programming languages based on the number of new GitHub repositories in the first 8 months of 2012 and 2013.
(excluding forks!)
Interestingly the numbers dropped significantly for every language (except JavaScript).
Perl dropped a lot more (in percentage) than other languages (from 48,620 to 15,412).
Some Perl repositories might be miscategorized by GitHub which might add to the low number, but then either it got worse in the last year, or regardless of that Perl has dropped a lot.
Still, there is something strange.
According to the
stats on CPANTESTERS
there were 1,524 new distributins uploaded to CPAN in the first 8 months of 2013.
That's only 10% of the number of GitHub repositories written in Perl.
What are all the other Perl-based projects?
The buzz around XML has passed and we are left with a lot of Perl modules to process XML in different ways. I was surprised to still find a gap for another XML processing module.
Common schema-less approaches to XML processing in Perl seem to use XML-LibXML, to get a full XML DOM or a stream of parsing events, or XML::Simple (better used as XML::LibXML::Simple. XML::Simple transforms between XML and Perl data structures but it was designed for "data-oriented" XML where element order does not matter a lot. With XML::Struct I created something like XML::Simple for "document-oriented" XML.
I’m starting to get serious about real-time web apps. At first I was considering using some of the Perl stuff (Meteor, Twiggy, AnyEvent, etc) to roll my own, but then I started looking around, and found a bunch of other interesting stuff to investigate:
The thing that’s cool about these services is that I can still write my apps using non-async stuff that I love (like DBIx::Class) and still get most/all of the benefits of an async web service.
If you do any kind of programming that extends beyond one-liners, you need to version control your work...even if you are a lone wolf weekend warrior, like myself.
Why? At least three reasons:
The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is rapidly approaching this October 4th, 5th, and 6th. We are now accepting talk proposals, registrations, and sponsorships. Please consider participating today:
The simple goal of Wx::Perl::Smart (WPS now for short) is to make WxPerl - GUI programing fast, fun and technically sober. By that I mean you still have full access under the hood (like Moose does) to all features of the old ways. Oh, and speaking of OO, I decided using no framework (yet), not even Moo. While sitting on top of Wx, you don't count bytes in memory, but there is no big syntactical gain now, since there are almost no attributes and the ones I have need a special treatment as described further along this article.
While it's still just started, goccy, a Japanese hacker who has been working on rathercoolmodules, has been working on PerlMotion, which allows you to write iOS apps in Perl.
I'm not an iOS guy so I haven't delved too deep into it, but other than the fact that it could use a bit more packaging love, I head that something is actually running on iOS... Although I'm not involved in project, I personally would love to see it get input from a lot more people, so I thought I'd let you guys know.
Welcome back for another exciting episode on the inner workings of
the perl interpreter! Last time we
covered some of the basic optimizations perl performs on SVs, as well as
the consequences of those optimizations. This time, we'll be going over
some of the optimizations specific to strings and arrays. I know I said
we'd be covering hashes too, but this article is already quite lengthy,
and I have enough material on hashes to merit its own article, so look for that
information in the upcoming third part of this series!
