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From ohloh.net:

I'm thinking no. Yes, Perl hasn't gained market share. It tends to stabilize these last three years, see especially if you see the contributors graph. But Perl was way too popular back then anyway, due to lack of alternatives for web languages (which is bad, in some ways). Come to think of it, there should be a lot more PHP and JavaScript developers than Perl developers, right?

My name is Kevin Carillo. I am a PhD student currently living in Wellington (New Zealand) and I am doing some research on Free/Open Source Software communities.
If you have joined the Perl community within the last 2 years, I would like to kindly request your help. I am interested in hearing from people who are either technical or non-technical contributors, and who have had either positive or negative newcomer experiences.

The purpose of the research is to work out how newcomers to a FOSS community become valued sustainable contributors.

You can complete the survey via my university's survey platform. For more detail on the project aims, see below.

What is the project about?
I am basically studying how the experience of a FOSS community newcomer has an influence on this person’s actions and project contributions in the community.

I am, somewhat famously, one of the last holdouts in the Perl community when it comes to moving away from svn to git.

I fought against the most for a long time, on the basis that the tool support for git on Windows was just terrible and it would make contributing to Perl difficult for Windows people.

Fortunately, with the availability of tools like SmartGit and GitHub for Windows this is no longer a problem.

So it looks like the time has for me to start the giant job of moving my repository over to GitHub myself (no small task considering it contains something like 300 modules).

As a first step, I am porting my personal release automation over to allow me to release modules from GitHub directly without the need for git client integration or a checkout at all.

The core of this new release automation is my new GitHub::Extract module.

> dmake
C:\CPANTE~1\PERL51~1.1\site\lib\auto\MINGW-~1.2\bin\gcc.exe -c  -IC:\CPANTesters\archives\db-4.8.30-mingw32\include\db  -DNDEBUG -DWIN32 -D_CONSOLE -DNO_STRICT-DPERL_TEXTMODE_SCRIPTS -DUSE_SITECUSTOMIZE -DPERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT -DPERL_IMPLICIT_SYS -DUSE_PERLIO -D_USE_32BIT_TIME_T -DHASATTRIBUTE -fno-strict-aliasing -mms-bitfields -O2           -DVERSION=\"1.827\"   -DXS_VERSION=\"1.827\"  "-IC:\CPANTesters\Perl5.16.1\lib\CORE"  -D_NOT_CORE  -DmDB_Prefix_t=size_t -DmDB_Hash_t=u_int32_t version.c
In file included from C:\CPANTesters\archives\db-4.8.30-mingw32\include\db/db.h:30:0,
                 from version.c:30:
c:\cpante~1\perl51~1.1\site\lib\auto\mingw-~1.2\bin\../lib/gcc/mingw32/4.6.2/../../../../include/pthread.h:612:3: error: expected identifier before numeric constant
dmake.exe:  Error code 129, while making 'version.o'

enum {
	PTHREAD_CREATE_JOINABLE       = 0,
	...
};

This post also serves as a reminder to self, to always, Always, ALWAYS check The CPAN first in the future.

Existing module on CPAN (which I failed to discover in time): WWW::PAUSE::CleanUpHomeDir

My solution (UserJS): pause-delete_files-select_all_older_releases_files.user.js

Ref: perlmonks thread

The actual intention behind perlybook.org was to make module documentation from CPAN more portable. Ebook-Readers today are designed for reading-pleasure everywhere - in your garden at daylight or in your bed at night... and this works so far.

But recently I noticed an effect which could also be of interest for "normal" Perl programmers who just work at a the computer and also prefer reading the docs there.

I always found it a bit complicated to read documentation on CPAN. If the author does not give a lot of love to the documentation it's even complicate to browse through all the docs of each module, since there is no auto-generated TOC over the complete distribution (only on inside each modules doc).

But there are even more issues.
See how the documentation of EBook::MOBI looks like on my screen (1920x1080):

This is what you see first. It is a horrible layout, isn't it? You have so much unused space and the TOC is so big that you don't see what you are probably most interested in... a small description and the example in the SYNOPSIS.

Hi All
How i can access a website with the help of Perl
- I am able to open the website and can enter the username and password and then log in into it
- After loginned i have to select a value from a drop down box(How Can i do that?)

So, like my entry on YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2011 last year, I thought I'd give you guys a very brief tour of what it was like this year. Before I start, you can find the full set of photos here, and videos will be uploaded here.

Do you mark favorite distributions on metacpan.org? Do you want to be able to do:

% cpanm -n Task::BeLike::YOURCPANID::Favorited

to install all your favorite modules in one go?

If yes, install Dist::Create::TaskBeLikeFavorited to create your task distribution, then type:

% create-task-belike-favorited-dist YOURCPANID
% cd Task-BeLike-YOURCPANID-Favorited
% dzil release

You'll probably want to tweak the generated dist.ini prior to dzil release.

An example distribution created by this tool is Task-BeLike-SHARYANTO-Favorited.

You'll also want to run:

% update-task-belike-favorited-dist
% dzil release

from time to time, to update your task, if you add/remove favorites.

Have fun.

Find my signature in the Google NY office, tell me where it is (you're not supposed to take pictures), and I'll send you a set of my books. It's not hidden, but it's not out of place either.

You don't have to work for Google to make good on this. The same technical sourced that gave me the tour can do the same for you. Ask for for the referral and I'll tell you who you have to talk to. If you were at dinner with me and NY.pm at Wildwood, you've already met him.

Google isn't known as a big Perl user, but Google isn't really looking for skills, unlike most companies I visit. They want people who know how things work, and everything after that is just tools.

Maybe I should send Google a set of books too. In there several walls of tech books, they have the right Perl titles, just in older editions.

Please note: the following was done as an exercise in intellectual curiosity and not in any way an example of a real optimization. Any comments about "premature optimization" will be downvoted as soon as we get a voting system ;)

We're deep in the heart of micro-optimizing some extremely performance-intensive code when I stumbled across this:

if ( $number == -1 ) {
    # do something
}

Clearly a numeric comparison isn't expensive and I managed to find a few areas where we could improve some performance, but out of curiosity, I decided to benchmark $number == -1. The -1 is returned if a function failed (because throwing an exception would be far too expensive here) and we test for that. In reality, we only care if the number is less than 0. I was mildly curious to know if I could get a tiny performance increase in bit comparison (again, this was curiosity only. If I have to get this deep in optimization, I have more serious issues than this).

[ crossposted from its original blog ]

Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic on the perl5-porters email list. Normally, I'd have a dusty thread and some "witty" banter here, but I'm just running too far behind for that this week.

Topics this week include:

• Perl 5.17.4 is now available
• Parrot 4.8.0 "Spix's Macaw" Released!
• WANTED: "whole program" benchmarks
• Changing the Perl error message when a module is not found
• Subroutine signatures on the blog
• Why ugly Perl is a guide for optimizing Perl

Hi

If you're using AT&T's Graphviz and you're interested in finding fixed length paths thru your graphs, there's a new module to help.

You'll need Marpa, and GraphViz2, and GraphViz2::Marpa. These will be installed as pre-reqs.

Then all you need is GraphViz2::Marpa::PathUtils, after it hits CPAN.

You can start reading the docs here.

Cheers

The time has made its 2% and brought us one week closer to the YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev!

This time our main news is that we are also closer to the point when we are able to fix and announce the dates of the conference. This week we explored a couple more venues, and there are only two left in our list.

Interestingly, we found a venue we did not met before, and it is the venue that a Python Pycon conference is exploiting in October. So far, there're President Hotel and European University that we will see in the following days. And then -- we select the venue based on different metrics :-)

I'm trying to get Plync to work with my Nexus 7, mainly because I want non-Google calendar synchronization between my mobile, my desktop and this shiny toy. Authentication works, but the Nexus 7 does not want to list the available folders at all and does not attempt to synchronize the Calendar folder.

To further debug this, having a good+free (or at least, available) ActiveSync server that I could use to debug the network traffic against would be very convenient. $work does not use ActiveSync, so it won't be much use there...

Here's my closing talk slides.

YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012 was great. All the guest speakers were great. Tim Bunce, Adam Kennedy, Ingy dot Net, Larry. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The official attendee count (based on ticket sales) was 743. If you added the speakers, it was 798, and if you added the staff, it was 841. At any given moment there were about 400 ~ 600 people in the venue. There were some no-shows too, but we haven't counted it. Thanks for all our attendees, our staff.

I'm honestly baffled by how big this event was. I seriously don't know if we can beat these numbers in the future. I'm tired. I want to see my son now (who has been with my grandparents and my wife since 3 nights ago).

We still got a few things to do, but YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012 is over. We had a blast.

Hope everybody enjoyed it, too!

[Quick note: This is mostly a Git story, although there’s plenty of links to Perl code and Perl discussions.  It also turned out to be quite a bit longer story than I originally intended.  But, even though it gets pretty deep into Git features, I think it should be interesting enough for anyone who has a CPAN module and uses Git.  I hope.]

The Backstory: So, a couple months back, I look in my email and spy a message from Damian Conway.  Now, some of you fine readers probably know Damian personally, and I’m sure I’ll get several comments pointing out how he’s just an ordinary bloke and all, but to you I say: hush!  You may be all jaded and world-weary, but I’m still just a regular Perl schmoe, and when I see an email from The Damian addressed personally to me, I get all goosebumpy.  So hush up and allow me my fanboy gushes.

Would a site like vworker but perl-specific, where freelancers could pick up (small bits of) work from others in the community, have any legs?

Here's an idea (actually, Michael Schwern's idea): Custom CPAN-like repositories hosted in the cloud. Imagine if you could put all the CPAN modules that you depend on (including any proprietary modules of your own) into a private (or public) repository up in the cloud. You just send your tar.gz files into the cloud where they are stored and indexed so you can build, test, and install them with the standard Perl toolchain. Every time you build your application, you'll get exactly the same versions of those modules.

Now imagine this repository in the cloud has a version control system, so you can review changes and roll back your module dependencies like you do with source code. You can also branch and merge your dependencies to experiment with upgrades or alternative modules. You can search & read the documentation for all the modules in the repository (including your proprietary modules). And you can do all this through your web browser or right at the command line!

Whoa, it's already 9/29, which is Day 2 for YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012.

This year's YAPC is going extremely well. I don't know, as an organizer I'm finding myself not having to hassle much. Something tells me we've passed a glass ceiling of sorts: I think we've reached the point where our reputation and our brand recognition is enough for the event to take life on its own. The speakers roll the show. The hallway tracks bring up the excitement. The attendees are finding more ways to enjoy the show.

I'm just going from room to room where the speakers non-Japanese, translating questions/answers, taking care of extra, unforeseen costs, checking out on our guests from abroad, and organizing the lightning talks - which may sound like a lot, but compared to previous years that I have been involved in this event, is a lot less stressful stuff.

I think that with only the minimal effort, YAPC::Asia Tokyo (or wherever in Japan) will probably be able to stand on its own.