The above linked page is a new Summary mode built in to Moritz's irc logging software. At the time of writing, this Summary is the same as the the Full log except most of the lines are omitted. There is none of the organizing I did in previous Summaries. Using this feature of Moritz's software is MUCH quicker and is the right way forward. I'll have more to say in the next few posts to this blog (after which you'll no longer be visiting this blog for Summaries because they'll appear at the regular log location).
To provide me feedback, gmail me at raiph.mellor or use the comment feature on this blog.
Welcome again to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic on
the perl5-porters email list. Are you tired of talking and thinking about
smartmatch? P5P was dominated this week by talk of named prototypes
(again.)
Since the named prototypes discussion had so many responses, they'll be
put at the end of the summary. I also decided this week to start a
"dusty" thread feature - some issue that's been raised on p5p but
without any subsequent response on the public list traffic.
This week's dusty thread is proposed/drafted new perl docs which
were part of the p5p summary in July. These docs cover metadoc, perlblurb,
perladvantages, and perlresources. They're intended for newbies and
language marketing purposes. You can find the docs in this git repo.
If you're interested in working on them, contact Uri Guttman.
We had our first project night at Chicago.PM this week, where we discussed ideas and wrote code for a Perl REPL GUI program (App-Prima-REPL on Github) by David Mertens built on Prima.
There were some small ideas to make the program more user-friendly, and some larger ideas like an IRC client and guided tutorials based on the same format that http://perltuts.com uses.
I'm hoping that if I keep saying this, I'll be embarrassed into doing it: I would really love to see the Ruby Koans translated into Perl (in spirit, if not in actual content). I've started writing down ideas for chapters, but there is a lot of content to cover.
I added a -I flag and a -M flag to the prima-repl command-line launcher that work as close to perl's flags as I could get. This is one of the things I love about prove and plackup: Where it makes sense, they work like perl does. So now the prima-repl can have subs and modules imported on the command-line.
Altogether it was a wonderfully productive evening and I'm looking forward to the next one.
This post is about
html_fmt,
a
Marpa-based
reformatter ("tidier") for liberal HTML.
html_fmt
indents HTML according to the structure of the document,
which makes the HTML a lot easier to read.
In the process
html_fmt
adds missing start and end tags and identifies "cruft".
html_fmt
is ultra-liberal about its input.
Like a browser's rendering engine,
html_fmt
never rejects a file,
no matter how defective it is as an HTML document.
An interesting experiment would be to compare what your
favorite browser does with a random text file feed to
it directly,
with what it does to the same file
after it has been passed through
html_fmt.
A few days ago I read Features Perl 5 Needs in 2012 by chromatic and while I thought the ideas were nice the only one I really cared about was a replacement for XS. I have tried with XS and FFI to bring in new libraries and it is just so painful. Marcus believes that Perl garbage collection needs a serious overhaul and I agree. Improved gc in a language is one of those things that helps ease development pain, specifically scalability issues. Java is always improving its gc to better meet new performance requirements. Structured core exceptions is another improvement that would be very nice. This got me thinking what would I like to see in the next version of Perl. I have never contributed to Perl core, never written a Perl book, and I do not follow p5p or Perl6 development. I have looked a little at the Perl source but nothing serious. This makes me an outsider to Perl development so I have a different viewpoint on what I should get out of Perl.
As explained in my previous blog post about parrot and
numbers
parrot writes floating-pointing numbers in the native format and reads
foreign floating-point numbers in different formats.
What kind of floating-point formats exist?
I'm only studying the commonly used base 2 encodings, usually called
double. Base 10 encodings decimal32, decimal64 and decimal128
also exist.
IEEE-754 defines half-precision (binary16), float (binary32), double
(binary64) and quad float (binary128). It does not define the most
popular format long double, esp. not the intel extended precision
format, which you normally would associate with long double. There is
a IEEE-754 long double but this only works on sparc64 and s390.
And since IEEE-754 long double is almost never used and hard to
implement in silicon, other architectures deviated wildly also.
So, in addition to Lausanne, Aarhus, and London, I am now also going to be visiting Stockholm in the next month.
Just two weeks ago, Claes Jakobsson and the wonderful folks at Init AB got in touch and invited me to come and speak at the Nordic Perl Workshop on Sunday October 14, and then to run two public Perl training classes on the following Monday and Tuesday.
I am extremely excited to be able to add these events to my schedule as I have never before been to Sweden, nor to an NPW. At the Workshop I'm going to talk about (and demo) my new Regexp::Debugger module...including some brand new and hitherto unreleased features.
If you're going to be in or near Stockholm in the middle of next month and would like to take part in any of these events, you can find out about the Nordic Perl Workshop from the yapc.eu website, and sign up for the training classes on Init's course page.
When creating an article for blogs.perl.org, place only one or two paragraphs in the BODY section. This is the lead (pronounced "leed") to the article. Place the bulk of the article in the EXTENDED section.
There is a little bit of overlap here with the first blog on Devel::Trepan. I apologize for that, but I don’t see how this can be avoided. The focus here though is more on the existing Perl debugger rather than Devel::Trepan which is given as one concrete example from which to draw lessons from.
A number of people, myself included, have talked about modernizing or replacing the venerable Perl debugger, perl5db.pl. Here I’d like to suggest a plan of action.
First the situation. It is in many ways similar to the challenges faced say in going from Perl5 to Perl6 — and in other languages Ruby 1.8 to 1.9 or Python 2.7 to Python 3K. What is there is:
The design for parrot, the vm (virtual machine) under rakudo (perl6),
envisioned a platform and version compatible, fast, binary format for
scripts and modules. Something perl5 was missing. Well, .pbc and .pmc
from ByteLoader serves this purpose,
but since it uses source filters it is not that fast.
Having a binary and platform independent compiled format can skip the
parsing compiling and optimizing steps each time a script or module is
loaded.
Version compatiblity was broken with the 1.0 parrot release, that's why
I left the project in protest a few years ago. Platform compatibility
is still a goal but seriously broken, because the tests were
disabled, and nobody cared.
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The editor is our most closest tool we spent most time with, any discussion will spark highly emotional reaction. But because it has to be the cosy seat to our personality I started Kephra.
Lets be honest most people I know see it like my little pet project ("good you allowed to upload to CPAN" but i will use vim/emacs/.. anyway), some like it enthusiastically but that's it mostly. But Kephra is not about to have a Editor written in Perl - Perl is just IMO the best tool for the job. It's not about certain features like nice integration of your favorite Perl tools, not even the TIMTOWTDI interface (having the best of vi, emacs, jedit, komodo, notepad in one place). My deepest satisfaction is to think things through and offer solution that go beyond mostly known and are deeply satisfactory (which is the Perl 6 approach of things too).
Every once in a while I check out indeed.com to see how Perl is doing vs. other languages like PHP, Python and Ruby in the job market. There's a worrysome trend lately - I'll let the graph speak for itself.
It's been some time since the last update on the progress.
A few weeks ago we set the new dates which is the weekend of 13th and 14th of October.
Stockholm is usually quite beautiful during early october and if weather permits I'm hoping that we can arrange a relaxing trip out to the archipelago before or after the workshop.
I'm happy that Damian Conway will be visiting the workshop this year to talk about regex debugging and will also provide training the days following the workshop thru our sponsor Init AB. Other speakers that are accepted so far are Jonas Nielsen who will present how to run Perl on Stackato and Ulrich Wisser on perlcritic.
But to make this workshop as good as NPW usually is we need you to attend and preferably also give a presentation.
We have a web developer position open in Helsinki, Finland. As I'm personally involved with this recruitment, and Perl can be the main tool in this job, I think it's ok to be posted on this forum. Read the full advertisement at our site, or below.
It's been a while since I've posted anything about Perl.
It's been a while since I've written much Perl as well, looking at my CPAN page shows a long gap since I moved over to America (and the Microsoft stack) to work at Kaggle.
The break has caused quite a few problems in terms of maintainership of various things. Padre's progress towards 1.00 has suffered quite a bit, and I've handed off a few modules where people showed interest in taking them over.
The time away from Perl has also given me a chance to reassess my work and the CPAN ecosystem and to think about which parts of it are actually important and which are in desperate need of a shake up.
The first project that badly needs some love is CPANDB, which is a single relatively small SQLite database (and ORM) layer that aggregates all the most important data about CPAN authors, distributions and modules together in one place.
