We discussed the reactions to the Perl 42 proposal and how to reach consensus on it. We want to get a handle on the technical feasibility and also discuss more closely with the people who have doubts.
We reviewed Paul’s clarifications to PPC0027 (any and all) and replied on the PR.
We discussed the mismatch between the definition of the PPC process and how it has worked out in practice, and tried to come up with a refactoring. We want to request a review.
We looked at the release process and the release manager role. We are considering the idea of making the shepherding of the perldelta a separate ongoing responsibility.
We spent some time working on our own meeting structure in order to better perform our project management responsibilities.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on October 20, 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: Poker Hand Rankings
A draw poker hand consists of 5 cards, drawn from a pack of 52: no jokers, no wild cards. An ace can rank either high or low.
Write a script to determine the following three things:
1. How many different 5-card hands can be dealt?
2. How many different hands of each of the 10 ranks can be dealt? See here for descriptions of the 10 ranks of Poker hands:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_poker_hands#Hand-ranking_categories
3. Check then the numbers you get in step 2 by adding them together and showing that they're equal to the number you get in step 1.
To the old Perl programmers out there looking for a new language to learn, I suggest giving Julia a serious look. I haven't had a language bring me this much joy since when I first discovered Perl a long time ago. If Perl is the grandpa, Julia is the granddaughter, and she's a really smart girl. She hangs out with scientists all day helping them make sense of their data, and she does it with a unique style.
To be continued...
(There's so much I want to say, but I don't want to commit the time to write it all down right now.)
We went through all the open PPC pull requests, with a goal of merging or closing as many of them as possible. The actual merging or closing will happen soon.
We merged PPC0025: “Perl 5 is Perl”.
We discussed some possible shortcomings of the PPC process and wrote down a few ideas for how we might address them. We intend to discuss these with the people originally involved with defining the PPC process.
We want to write PSC blog posts to put intentions and ideas on record for the future. We discussed topics for blog posts we want to post soon.
We discussed the structure of our meetings, to make sure we take care of our duties and avoid losing track of things.
In my previous articles (#1 and #2), I covered the key activities of The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF), such as organizing conferences, providing grants, and other smaller initiatives. In this final article, I will explore TPRF's financials using publicly available data. As a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, TPRF is required to disclose their financial information to the IRS. As always, my opinions are my own and do not represent the views of the TPRF Board.
Revenue and Expenses: Year-to-Year Overview
Let's start by reviewing TPRF's revenue and expenses over the years.
Until 2019, both revenue and expenses fluctuated. However, in 2020, the financial landscape changed significantly, with both revenue and expenses dropping sharply. This trend continued into 2021, largely because TPRF held its conferences virtually, reducing costs but also potentially limiting revenue opportunities.
In 2023, TPRF experienced another sharp decline in revenue while expenses surged, leading to a large deficit of $140,213.
Here's a comparison of key financial figures over three years:
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on October 20, 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: Middle Index
You are given an array of integers, @ints.
Write a script to find the leftmost middle index (MI) i.e. the smallest amongst all the possible ones.
A middle index is an index where ints[0] + ints[1] + … + ints[MI-1] == ints[MI+1] + ints[MI+2] + … + ints[ints.length-1].
If MI == 0, the left side sum is considered to be 0. Similarly, if MI == ints.length - 1, the right side sum is considered to be 0.
Return the leftmost MI that satisfies the condition, or -1 if there is no such index.
It's a little over a week until this year's London Perl and Raku Workshop. Here's a couple of things to note about the day.
The schedule is relatively fixed at this point, however if you haven't already starred the talks you plan to attend then please do so as this will inform any tweaks. The venue has a large room (150 people) and a smaller room (35 people) therefore it is helpful to know which talks might be heavily attended in advance so we can make sure those talks have enough space.
The venue, The Trampery in Old Street, is located a two minute walk from the Northern Line's Old Street tube station in central London. The Northern Line has stops at most of the major train stations in London, or trivial links to others, so we recommend taking the tube to get to the venue.
Another extended meeting, which everyone attended. Here’s a summary:
We want to get actual implementation of TLS in core underway. Paul volunteered for some of it. We’ll email our plan to p5p, to get things started.
We talked about undef-aware equality operators. While the flags idea is tempting, we don’t think that there are enough useful flags to go down this route (what’s the use of stacking flags, if you only have one). If equ and === are added to Perl, we think the negative versions (neu and !==) should be added as well.
We had a quick version discussion. The document is almost ready.
We want to poke the PPC implementors again, to make sure we can have some of them available in the next version of Perl.
I am in the process of adding OpenWeatherMap support to Xasteria Weather for iOS and the proxy I built is in Perl. Since there was only an old module on CPAN which did not support the current API and was not easily updatable, I released Weather::OWM. It's a very simple module, similar to two other Weather modules I've released in the past (Weather::WeatherKit and Weather::Astro7Timer).
The OpenWeather API has a Free tier with both current weather and forecast, which makes the module useful to anyone interested in fetching weather for any location. E.g.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on October 13, 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: Luhn’s Algorithm
You are given a string $str containing digits (and possibly other characters which can be ignored). The last digit is the payload; consider it separately. Counting from the right, double the value of the first, third, etc. of the remaining digits.
For each value now greater than 9, sum its digits.
The correct check digit is that which, added to the sum of all values, would bring the total mod 10 to zero.
Return true if and only if the payload is equal to the correct check digit.
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.
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We continued refining our plan for TLS in core. We will collect
feedback on its feasibility from the maintainers of the relevant
modules.
We reviewed the status of putting the apostrophe package separator
behind a feature and approved the PR.
We confirmed that we want to deprecate smartmatch with a feature. This
effectively means that we don’t plan for a “better smartmatch” at this
time (but it can still be pursued in future, by way of the air gap
strategy, if there is appetite). We will file an issue for this.
We agreed that “negative” features (rather than outright removal) is
our preferred way to deprecate historical Perl quirks as the language
continues to evolve.
We discussed our ongoing inadequacy at dealing with maintenance
releases. We wrote down next steps to get back on track, and also
started looking into capturing a checklist to document the process.
In my last post, I talked about some of the big things TPF (The Perl Foundation) does. This time, I'll discuss some of the smaller stuff I've handled at TPF, often with help from others, and my misses along the way. My opinions are my own.
White Camel Awards
The White Camel Awards, started by brian d foy in 1999, were created to honor Perl community contributors, who, like ninjas, do all the hard work but never seem to get noticed. brian personally picked the winners each year until he stepped down in 2018. While many people contribute to the Perl community, their efforts often fly under the radar. I mean, organize a Perl event every year and your name still wouldn't make it outside the venue. Tough, right?
In 2022, I took over the award with TPF, with brian's blessing, to keep this tradition alive.
I gave the talk Maximizing Performance and Cost Efficiency in the Cloud at the Perl and Raku conference this year. Among others, it used data from a benchmarking comparison I did among dozens of VMs on various cloud providers, and I had promised I'd post the full report.
It took me quite a bit longer than expected due to both technical complications and some new releases I wanted to include that enlarged the scope, but here it is now. Should be useful if you want to get the best bang for buck on the cloud.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 29, 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: Closest Palindrome
You are given a string, $str, which is an integer.
Write a script to find out the closest palindrome, not including itself. If there are more than one then return the smallest.
The closest is defined as the absolute difference minimized between two integers.
We were joined by Leon Timmermans and Tim Legge to discuss plans for TLS support in core.
We talked about our inadequate handling of point releases and especially security releases. In the past this was handled on individual initiative. We need to institutionalize at least some of this as actual process to keep things on the rails.
We discussed with Leon and Tim what we want to do to have TLS support in core. Future support for underlying APIs other than OpenSSL is desirable. Net::SSLeay also has cruft that we would prefer to avoid in core.
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.
Since its founding in 2000, CV-Library has relied on Perl as the backbone of its core operations. Today, as the UK’s leading independent job board, we host over 150,000 job postings and maintain a database of more than 20 million CVs.
For nearly 25 years, CV-Library has been a committed supporter of LPW and the Perl community. We're proud to reaffirm this dedication at the 2024 conference.
Our platform now integrates modern Perl with Go, leveraging Kubernetes for scalable deployments, alongside other cutting-edge technologies to ensure stability and reliability.
Our development team consistently delivers high-quality features through code reviews, automated tests, and continuous deployment. Additionally, we regularly contribute to free and open-source projects, including CPAN.
CV-Library offers remote opportunities for developers and testers at all levels. We encourage participation in community meetups and collaboration days. Feel free to introduce yourself to Mark or any member of our team at the event, or explore our current job openings here.
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 contains 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.
Following can be considered as one step:
Insert one character;
Delete one character;
Replace one character with another.
A Simplification
To make the algorithm simpler, let’s ignore deletion. Instead of deleting a character, we can always replace it with a character different to the original one and its neighbours (you can easily verify that it can’t break any of the three criteria: it doesn’t shorten the password, it doesn’t remove more characters than the deletion would have deleted, and it never creates repeating characters).
The Algorithm
Let’s keep a set of strings we need to check, we’ll call them the agenda. At the start of the program, the agenda contains the input string.
This virtual Conference on December 18th, 2024 is being called in conjunction with the creation of the Science Perl Journal, Winter 2024 Issue.
We have 6 author committments from some very exciting topics, but we want more! The Summer Issue has 8 authors and is nearly 150 pages. We are looking to double the number of authors, doubling the number of pages is going to be a stretch :-).
DESCRIPTION
Christos Argyropoulos, MD, PhD. is our moderator for this virtual event, which is December 18th, 2024 - Perl's 37th birthday! At this event we will be announcing our Summer 2025 plans, which will include a 3rd Issue of the SPJ.
The following lengths will be accepted for publication and presentation:
