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Now that Perl's builtin functions can directly operate on hashrefs and arrayrefs (I'm already starting to dread having to write push @{$foo->{bar}} instead of just push $foo->{bar}, but I'll be stuck with 5.10 for at least a couple more years), it chuckles me a bit imagining a future where beginners only use and know about scalars, and not arrays/hashes. Where they just need to memorize $ as the variable prefix. And where % and @ are nowhere to be found in baby Perl.
Among the issues with this would include the many special variables like @_, @INC and %INC, %ENV, %SIG and so on. We can provide some abstraction like self or MooseX::Declare for @_. With Moose et al, we already don't need to muck with @ISA directly.
Another would be list assignment, but I don't think beginners use it much.
Wouldn't it be cute? Albeit a bit pointless maybe. I can do away with context in Perl, but for now I like being able to have $thing, @thing, and %thing at the same time. Or do I?
As a few of my previous posts have implied, I am attempting to reinvigorate the Zoidberg Perl shell. Much of the work of getting it back to a functional state has already been done at my GitHub repo. I have a bigger post coming on why this is cool and even another with some examples, but for now I have a question:
Is an AutoSplit/AutoLoader mechanism helpful on modern hardware? I mean Moose/MOP (and many other projects) are huge and doesn’t use it. In fact it seems that very few modules depend on it.
Now, I understand that AutoLoader has some cool uses for causing subs to spring into existance. In the context of Zoidberg, though, I only care about its use to defer loading infrequently used subs.
To test some things, I created a branch in which I naively removed these bits, and lo and behold, with only one missing my (see AutoLoader Considered Harmful), the tests all pass and a quick run seems fine.
So I fairly call the question: should I leave AutoLoader in, or pull it?
Since I’ve never used MT before I signed up to blogs.perl.org, it’s only recently that I found that MT does have some spam settings, which unfortunately are not turned on or default to the most conservative value. Along with other settings, you can reduce the number of spam comments being posted/notified to you.
You can increase spam detection aggressiveness (Preferences → Spam). By default this is set to 0 which allows many spams to pass through. I set this now to 5 which seems to be okay (so far only 2 spams after a couple of days).
You can disallow anonymous comments (Preferences → Comments → Setup Registration) or at least require email verification. By default anonymous comments are turned on and email verification is not required.
You can use CAPTCHA! (Preferences → Comments). By default this is off, and unfortunately when I tried to turn it on (either using MT’s own CAPTCHA or reCaptcha), no image is displayed and yet all comments got rejected with the message “Text entered is not correct”. I guess this is currently a bug.
I noticed today that my firefox has been really slow lately.
I use a firefox plugin named
vimperator
which provides vim-like keybindings for firefox.
I have it configured it to store 5000 command history entries, which is considerably more than the default (500).
It has always been in the back of my mind that this might come back to bite me one day.
So today I decided to check how many entries have so far been saved in the history file.
I easily found that the history is stored in a json file located at ~/.vimperator/info/default/history-command.
Running wc (word count) wouldn't help because all the data is stored on one line.
I noticed that the file simply contains a serialized json array.
To determine the size of this array, I used
App::p
and whipped up this simple one-liner:
One of the common gotchas with Test::NoWarnings is that the warnings are collected up and displayed in one go at the end of the script.
While this is strictly speaking the correct time to show them and has the least likelihood to result in a collision with some other test module resulting in an explosion, it makes debugging test scripts much more difficult.
Since I took over Test::NoWarnings a number of people have asked me to “fix” this problem.
After much thought, I’ve decided to leave Test::NoWarnings default behaviour the way it is and show everything at the end.
Instead I’ve added a specific debugging aid in the form of an :early pragma.
use Test::NoWarnings 1.04 ':early';
The :early pragma explicitly turns on emitting warnings at the time they occur instead of gathering them until the end.
The talk submission process for YAPC::NA 2012 closes on March 15th. After that time we’ll finish building out the schedule with the talks that have been submitted. So if you’d like your talk considered, please submit it today.
GitHub is a great place to host open-source projects and expose them to a wide community of developers, so it's not surprising that more and more Perl modules are making it their home.
One of the features of GitHub is that it checks if a repository has a README file in its root directory, and displays it on the home page of the repository. This makes the README file a good place to introduce your project to the public.
GitHub also understands a number of markup languages, such as Markdown and Textile, and if the README file is in one of these formats, it will be transformed into nicely formatted HTML. One of the supported formats is POD, which means that the standard documentation of a Perl module can be used as its README file and serve as the repository's home page (much like on CPAN).
This is the first of a series of posts that will detail
a Marpa-based "Ruby Slippers"
approach to parsing liberal
and defective HTML.
As an example, let's look at a
few lines
taken more or less at random
from the middle
of the perl.org
landing page.
That page is exactly 400 lines long.
Here is line 200 and some lines
lines to either side of it.
</td>
<td>
<div class="module">
<a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/">
<img alt=""
src="http://mc-cdn.pimg.net/images/icons/onion.vee5cb98.png"
width="45" height="45" />
</a>
<h4>
<a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/">The Perl Foundation</a>
</h4>
<p>
The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement
of the Perl programming language through open discussion,
collaboration, design, and code.
For readability, I've rearranged
the whitespace, but otherwise the above is untouched.
My more-or-less-random extract is part of a table, and captures the
end tag of one cell and the beginning of another.
A very tiny handful of you may know that I was trying to push YAPC::Cuba. Later I expanded the idea to be a more general open source conference in Cuba as that would likely be a better fit. Sadly, it appears that it's not to be (or at least, not to be through me). There was a fair amount of excitement at the idea from those I spoke with. Quite a few said they wanted to be involved and would contribute time and effort to it, but as is often the case with volunteers, time is at a premium and dedicating volunteer time to a long-shot opportunity is understandably low on their priority list.
And of those who I spoke with who said they wouldn't attend? They were invariably not US citizens. They expressed concern about repercussions from the US government for attending a conference they were legally allowed to attend.
Isn't that sad? People are afraid of the US and it kills the chance to have an interesting conference at a time when it seems perfect for Cuba and the world to be talking.
brian d foy will be giving a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
A modulino is a module that also can act like a script. This talk explores how a typical command-line invocation of the script, with switches and standard input and output, can connect with a module’s interface without sacrificing flexibility.
Net::SSH2 (ssh client library based off libssh2) now has agent support, something that i've been wanting for a while and had just sat down to write. Very happy it had already been done! Thanks fellas!
Normally the release schedule of DBD::SQLite is tied to that of SQLite update recommendations, as this module is used in an enormous number of places and having relatively large gaps between releases is considered an advantage for downstream distributions and corporate users in particular that have very large testing burdens for each release.
This is the first DBD::SQLite in a long time that was not done as the result of an update recommendation from the SQLite maintainers.
In addition to a number of Perl level bug fixes, this release gains the SQLite 3.7.8 and 3.7.9 updates, the former of which contains a new merge sort for indexing resulting in an order of magnitude performance improvement to indexing and performance improvements to any queries that do index lookups.
I want to fix his only module on CPAN (POSIX::RT::MQ), but his public email address no longer exists. If I can not reach him I will ask the PAUSE admins for permission to take over this module.
Steffen Mueller will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
Booking.com is the world’s leading online travel agent for hotel reservations. It is a wildly successful enterprise that was built with Perl at its heart. The company’s IT team runs millions of lines of Perl code on thousands of servers.
In this presentation, we will outline how we migrate(d) one of the world’s biggest users of Perl across 14 stable releases of Perl from 5.8.5 to 5.14.2, why we did that, what bit us, and what we learned from it.
I've been working on Redis::Client for a while now. It's not ready for production use yet, and there's a lot of work yet to be done, but it's much better than anything else on CPAN right now for talking to Redis.
I hate boilerplate with a burning passion, and I will often go to extreme lengths to avoid typing it. (I typed it once already, dammit! Leave me alone!)
After having a great time learning to mess with Dist::Zilla, I decided to give another of Ricardo's projects, Pod::Weaver a try. Here's the cool stuff I was able to do after not a lot of work.
In
a previous post,
I listed the four ideas
that are essential to
Marpa.
This post delves into
one of them: Ruby Slippers parsing.
In Ruby Slippers parsing, the parser imagines
("wishes")
that the language it is parsing
is easier
to parse than it actually is.
The part of the application that handles input
(the "lexer")
manipulates the input
to make the parser's
"wishes" come true.
As an example,
take liberal HTML.
"Liberal HTML" is HTML as it is found "in the wild",
with missing and spurious tags.
I've written a
Marpa-powered liberal HTML parser
which uses the Ruby Slippers as its primary
technique.
The grammar behind
Marpa::HTML
assumes a fantasy world,
one where no element ever occurs out of place,
and where all HTML elements have both start and end tags.
