blogs.perl.org

Tracy Ragan will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

Defining a build to deploy process that can easily be passed between development operations can be a challenge with the “one off” script.  The scripts designed for the developers purpose do not meet the production control needs.  Developers are looking for speed and agility, while production looks for audit and control.  

This talk reviews how OpenMake Software leverages Perl to create a Smart Scripter language that can auto-generate build, test and deploy scripts for multiple environments across the life cycle. You will learn how Perl has been used to create a adaptable build, test and deploy process without relying on one off script driven process, moving instead to a dynamic and adaptable model driven process based on the Perl language.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

Tom Christiansen compiled a table of escape sequences by the version of Perl that introduced them. This is the sort of Perl documentation that I like. It's too bad he doesn't blog, but I don't think he'll mind me reposting this part of his private email. :)

We've come up with all sorts of good ideas for Programming Perl since we turned the book in two weeks ago.

(Download as gist 1342877)

This list is sorted by escape, but you know Perl so you can re-sort it by version yourself:

For reasons I don't fully understand, I don't get the chance to give classes very often in my own country. And even less often do I get to give public classes. I'd certainly like to do so more frequently, but the opportunities just don't seem to arise.

So it's an unusual pleasure to be offering two classes in both Melbourne and Brisbane in the next month or so. As part of the YOW! 2011 conference, I'm running my "Perl Best Practices" class (on Nov 29 in Melbourne and Dec 7 in Brisbane) and my "Presentation Aikido" class (on Nov 30 in Melbourne and Dec 8 in Brisbane). That second class is a particular rarity, as I've never before offered it as a public class in Australia.

So if your interested in improving either your mastery of Perl or your skills as a presenter, click on the links and sign up!

Damian

I'd like to find an alternative to the term "technical debt", but I doubt I could convince people to adopt it. Technical debt is so ingrained in the programmer's consciousness that we seem to confuse metaphors with synonyms. Metaphors are to synonyms as transvestites are to my wife (and that's an analogy I'm sure she's going to bring up over the dinner table).

Technical debt bears a resemblance to actual debt, but it's not the same thing. Like actual debt, it's accrued in the same currency (skilled labor over time) that must be used to pay it off. Like actual debt, it's often desirable if you need something now and can't wait for it.

We were discussing in email at work when Abigail put the nail in the coffin of the "technical debt is actual debt" debate. Specifically:

• Sometimes it's OK to default on technical debt (code rewrite, proof of concept, business requirements change, and so on)
• Monetary debt has a schedule on which you must pay it. Technical debt does not.

From guest poster brian d foy:

I speak at many Perl events, from casual Perl mongers meetings to the big conferences. I’ve even been in front of a big room at Comdex and WWDC. That’s over a long career of speaking that built up to those big events. As conference season approaches, you have a chance to stand in front of a bunch of people and say whatever you like. You’re probably nervous about that, maybe even terrified. I want to you to tame that terror. It’s not going to disappear, but you can learn to control it.

You might think that you’re not a good speaker. Well, you aren’t now, but Muhammad Ali, a great boxer and a better speaker, wasn’t the world champion boxer league he started either. Darth Vader was a lowly slave boy before he almost ruled the galaxy. Shakespeare was a short order cook in high school. Chuck Norris was probably always Chuck Norris, though.

TL;DR version
"Perl has many \@grammar."
Perl is inspired from english fucking grammar, *not* english fucking language.

You see what Ich did there ? I used the word "fucking" two times. In both instances, I placed it between two different words. The communicated result is free fucking emphasis.

The idea of adding *fucking* in between two words for emphasis is a very interesting principle.

my fucking lunch.
my fucking life.
bang fucking bang.

The fact that it can be placed between two arbitrary words is *important*.

In fact, the idea of using '*' around words is also similar to THE idea of emphasis.

In the first case, we used infix notation and in the second case we use the circumflex notation.

And that my dear world, is a grammatical principle. It is a structural principle. It is a generative principle. It's inorganic chemical experiments for alphabets to do interesting things.

I'm glad that I can announce the release of HTML::ValidationRules.

• http://search.cpan.org/dist/HTML-ValidationRules/

Even if we validate user inputs on client-side according to client-side form validation spec. defined in HTML5, we still need do same thing on server-side. It results that there're redundant validation rules around.

I wanna make a proposal; How about regarding client-side form validation as some common format for describing validation rules both for client-side and server-side?

This distribution consists of 2 parts modules below:

• HTML parser to extract validation rules from given HTML file/string.
• Plugins for existing validation module (for FormValidator::(Simple|Lite) so far, because I usually use it).

Caveats: This module hasn't supporte all the attrs defined in HTML5 spec.

Anyway, some patches or proposals are welcome.

October was a rather quiet month publicly, but behind the scenes there has been a number of fixes, improvements and discussions.

The most notable fix was getting the summary emails running again. It is still not perfect just yet, but I'm hoping that the ongoing fine-tuning will reduce the bouce-backs and faults that I'm currently seeing. The configurations are all from what was in the database at the end of August, so apologies if you've wanted to change these. The configurations are normally exposed via the Preferences website, but as the SSL certificate for the new server hadn't been approved it has a little longer than anticipated to get it up and running again. GoDaddy have now approved this and it's all ready to go, so I'm hoping this can all be sorted in the next few days.

It’s the first Tuesday of the month, so that means it’s YAPC::NA Planning Meeting time. If you’re in the Madison area, or don’t mind a drive there is a YAPC planning meeting tonight at the Essen Haus at 7pm. As always the food and beer are sponsored by Plain Black, and the room is sponsored by Essen Haus.

We’ve got a lot to discuss so the meeting will probably last until around 9pm, but you’re free to come and go as you please.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

Anyone using HAProxy?

I am writing a perl module to interface with the Socket API.

https://github.com/robinedwards/Net-HAProxy/

Will be pushing to CPAN next week sometime, your feedback is most welcome.

http://prepan.org/module/3Yz7PYrBHH

Bad timing: now that smart-matching is under scrutiny, I've started to have fun writing Perl like this:

use signatures;
use Path::Class;

file( 'file.txt' ) ~~ sub ($f) {
   say $f->basename;
   say $f->slurp;
};

This style and syntax is reminiscent of Python's with and Ruby's do, and, for this use case in particular, feels a bit more natural to me than right-to-left, functional-style Perl5:

map { say $_->slurp } file( 'file.txt');

I am teaching kids perl programming. They use perldoc.perl.org. Search on perldoc.perl.org is awful. Period.

Problem is not the outdated tutorials somewhere on the internet. Outdated official sites like perldoc.perl.org, cpan.org - are the real problem.

chromatic will be giving a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 that he describes as:

Perl 1 was a quick and dirty tool intended to solve problems with minimal ceremony. Perl 5 continues that proud tradition and extends it with our amazing CPAN.

Yet sometimes our amazing tools aren’t what we need. Sometimes we make more work for ourselves. Sometimes the monolingual purity of our conventional orthodoxy gets in the way.

Sometimes solving a problem the best way (performance, ease, simplicity, safety, schedule) means doing it the wrong way.

I’ll show examples from real projects, deployed to real users, and explain why we chose to do things the wrong way. Potential examples include:

* HTML parsing
* Database updates
* Caching and the lack thereof
* Avoiding rework
* Error handling
* Queueing

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

This posting series relate to wishlist for existing modules. Some items are serious, some are not. I have not created a patch or submitted an RT ticket for the items, I'm posting them first to see other people's take on things.

1. Parallel cpanm. Last time I checked, there's a github issue on it. Ever had to install 200-300 modules on new servers? Without -n? Not for the terribly impatient. I suspect this is best implemented by a wrapper for cpanm.

2. DateTime->from_ymd(). It irks me that I have to write DateTime->new(year=>Y, month=>M, day=>D) everytime or (worse) having to use one of the DateTime::Format modules for this simple task.

In the past week or so, there has been a lot of discussion about improving the Perl tutorials. I think this is a great idea, and I even think I have something to contribute. Much of my work has been to allow for more scientific computation with Perl, including using PDL.

In order to start making a “Perl for Science” tutorial site, including some non-science Perl beginning material, I wanted to find a CMS, written in Perl (I can’t have a Perl tutorial site written in PHP!!) and having built-in code syntax highlighting. I couldn’t find it. Then I decided I had wanted a reason to try Mojolicious, so maybe this was it. I could write a template for tutorials and populate then with content using PPI to provide highlighting.

Since Mojolicious::Plugin::PPI didn’t exist yet, I made it up, based in large part on PPI::HTML. It is still rough around the edges, but I thought I would post something here to get some comments. I’m thinking about trying PrePAN too, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.

P.S. The tutorial site isn’t up yet, and may not be for a little bit. Of course I will post here when it is.

Cyber jacked ya, eh?

Merge Hash

sub merge_hash {
    my ($self, $precedent, $subordinate) = @_;
    my @not = grep !exists $precedent->{$_}, keys %{$subordinate};
    @{$precedent}{@not} = @{$subordinate}{@not};
    return $precedent;
}

QR Code Scanner Pro is one of the better QR Code readers for Blackberry. Most importantly, it handles vCards. Since we’re using a lot of QR Codes at YAPC::NA 2012, do yourself a favor and get QR Code Scanner Pro, if you’re a Blackberry user.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

While I generally like Ocaml (as some of you may have guessed), there is one pet peeve of mine with the language: record fields names are module wide rather than record specific. For example:

type t = { blah : int }

The record field blah is now a module wide name so I cannot reuse it. Thus, field names that happen to be useful in two contexts are not allowed. Although, to be honest, having two record names the same is probably a sign of a refactor point.

It was exactly 1 year ago today (Nov 3, 2010) that I registered the metacpan.org domain name. Over the course of this year, the project has gone from a couple of guys writing some code to a true community effort. MetaCPAN is steadily being adopted by Perl developers around the globe and it is steadily gaining in functionality.

Together we've created a free, open, collaborative project which makes new tools available to CPAN lovers everywhere. The API has spawned some cool and very useful projects. The web site has spawned some much needed functionality in the form of diffs, syntax highlighting, author profiles etc.

DBD::Firebird 0.9 has been released with a create_database method, using the isc_dsql_execute_immediate call. This means you can use DBD::Firebird to create a database without depending on the presence of a binary on the filesystem, which was the old way of doing things. Lots easier!