As you know we’ve started the open call for presentations for YAPC::NA 2012. This year, we’re going to be approving talks using a new process.

We’ll start approving talks next week, rather than waiting until we have a large array of talks. We’ll give priority to talks that fit with the Beginner Track or Perl in the Wild Track. We’ll be approving a handful of talks every week. This doesn’t mean that if your talk isn’t approved right away, it won’t be. However, the sooner you get your talk proposals in, the better chance you have of getting a talk approved and placed on the schedule.

Our deadline for proposals is March 15, 2012. So get those proposals in now. This year, there’s no time for procrastination, because the slots will be getting filled up in real-time.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I've heard some people complain about 5.12 and 5.14 not adding many new major features. Compared to 5.10 that's certainly true, but is that a bad thing?

Let's be honest, many (most) prominent new features of 5.10 are failures:

• Smartmatching? I think everyone agrees it is broken.
• given/when is even worse as it's almost impossible to predict if it will use smartmatching or not.
• Lexical $_? Mostly a new source of bugs, and the _ prototype is merely a hack to work around lexical $_ issues.
• MAD? It never reached any usable form.
• etcetera…

A lot of others are not flawed, but are so uncommon that I haven't seen them being used in any code. UNITCHECK, stacked filetests, no VERSION, the list goes on…

At INOC, my place of work, I work on a lot of web applications with the backend written in Perl using Catalyst, and the frontend written in Javascript using ExtJS. With a UI written completely in Javascript, I often encounter bugs of the following form:

1. Fire up Catalyst.
2. Login.
3. Click through half a dozen controls in the UI.
4. Enter some data.
5. Click “submit”.
6. Watch the web application give you an angry error.

YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2011 is over. 2 days + little extra of Perl festivities.

Facts: 30 corporate sponsors, 42 volunteer staff, 71 talk submissions (50 or so accepted), 91 individual sponsors, and.... 672 attendees. Yes, 672. I think it's safe to say that it's the biggest YAPC EVER. Wow. Just wow.

I'm so exhausted now (and I apparently caught a cold), so I can't quite come up with an eloquent way to express how I feel... but... wow.

Slides are being collected here.

Photos for day 0 and day 1 are available here. Day 2 will be available soon-ish

Videos will be available here (941-san is doing the editing as we speak)

For those of you missed it, well, I hope you can make it to one some time in the future :)

At YAPC::NA 2012 we’re thinking about stealing a feature from PyCon they call Startup Row. In their exhibit hall they give away booth space to feature some up and coming new companies. 

There are a lot of new companies using Perl these days, like Parking Mobility, Social Flow, and Bluer.  I even have a few of my own. I’m willing to bet there are a lot out there we just don’t know about.

Depending on the interest level and number of submissions, we’ll either add some booths to our Job Fair for this, or we’ll open a completely separate exhibit space for it. 

If you’re interested in getting a free booth and some other exposure at YAPC::NA 2012, please fill out our Startup Row Application. Submission deadline is March 1, 2012.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

So we had the Belgian Perl Workshop 2011 last Saturday.

I wish to thank all participants for the conviviality of the event. We had a bunch of interesting interactive talks, which where well prepared by the speakers.

Including the gurus who shared their knowledge, the audience was particularly and constructively active during the talks. There were a lot of interventions and all went smoothly.

This is exactly what a workshop should be. People are learning by asking questions while others share info by interfering with the speaker's flow in a non-invasive way. Somehow everyone just felt that the flow belongs to the speaker.

Congrats to all participants for this brainstorming workshop !

Ever since I read this piece and more on evolutionary biology, ideas have been flipping in my mind.

This is more of a private hypothesis and I think it might be useful to perl community on how it sees itself from a long time lurker's perspective. I am not a good sample point though :)

This post has nothing to do with sexual selection. It's more about how communities are formed and how they sustain in a changing world.

Each and every programming language/Operating System/License out there has a community around it. A twitter hashtag has a micro community around it.

Generalizing from handicap principle and signaling theory, these are my axioms (sort of)

1) A community forms around signals
2) Signals are a way community member's recognize each other
3) Signals are *the only way* to recruitment new members
4) The signals of one community are irrelevant to other community
5) Signals encourage risky and useful behavior
6) Signals can't be described easily because there can be non-linguistic signals

A question recently appeared on Stack Overflow about using namespace::autoclean in conjunction with operator overloading.

It turns out that you can't, because namespace::autoclean, in addition to cleaning up symbols for imported subs, also cleans up the operator magic installed by overload.pm.

This had been noticed before, but the suggested fix was rejected in favor of implementing the logic to support overload methods in Class::MOP, which namespace::autoclean uses under the hood to figure out the list of allowed methods for a class, and it doesn't look like anyone is interested in doing that right now.

As it happens, I'm working on a distribution right now which uses Moose and does some operator overloading, so namespace::autoclean would be a problem. I decided that there's really no reason a symbol-cleaning pragma should depend on Moose (or the MOP) so I wrote namespace::sweep as a replacement. More on the advantages and disadvantages below.

Submit a talk for YAPC::NA 2012. We’re especially interested in talks on real-world Perl apps and quintessential Perl 101 talks, but we’re open to any ideas you have. 

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I'm writing about the Standard Perl Library for the Camel book (it still feels really strange to say something like that, like "Yeah, I'm helping ol' Mike paint the ceiling in this church, boy does my back hurt"). I'm going through the various installation directories and the limitations of @INC.

As you know, Perl searches @INC for a matching file. When it finds it, it stops. It won't keep looking for a later version

The ambitious can get around this. You could write a code reference that you stick in the front and completely reimplement the whole process. You can pre-scan the entire @INC and create links in a directory that you put at the front of @INC.

Does anyone actually do that for anything that matters (and not just for giggles)?

I could say a lot more about this, but it's back to the salt mines, ceiling, whatever.

We're still in the middle of Day 2, but we have photos available for Day 0 and Day 1. Day 2 photos will be available from the same URL.

For those would-be organizers: Since two years ago, we're hiring a professional photographer to capture the essence of the event. It's an extra cost, but very well worth it. You should consider it too!

TPF just opened a call for grant proposals. See details here: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/10/2011q4-call-for-grant-proposal.html.

A lot of people have been asking lately, how much YAPC::NA 2012 will cost to attend, so I guess I’m a bit behind schedule on publishing that pricing. 

• Conference: $150, but if you register before May 1, 2012 you get the early-bird price of $100.
• Spouse’s Program: $150, but if you register before May 1, 2012 you get the early-bird price of $100.
• Either Workshop: $500, but if you register before May 1, 2012 you get the early-bird price of $250.

As part of Perl: The Next Generation, we also have needs-based scholarships available. 

We’ll be opening registration in February. 

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

The field of computation has many many metaphors. Objects is one of them.

To be honest, I don't really understand object oriented programming. I understand procedural programming aka C.

Procedural programming is like treating your computer as a dumb assistant. You tell it _what to do_ in the exact order(program/script).

Recently I began thinking about OOP in terms of how it can expand the dumb assistant metaphor. So this post is an exercise of trying to articulate it albeit, poorly.

In the real world, objects are dumb things. They sit around and do nothing. It is always a person who finds use for them.

Classically speaking, things have properties and things can be arranged into classes. It is the properties of the *thing* that differentiate it from other things of it's class and things of other classes.

I released Marpa::XS 0.016000 a week ago and the cpantesters results look excellent. With this release, my conversion of Marpa from Perl to C is finished. A lot of Perl code remains, to be sure, but all of it is code that arguably belongs in some kind of higher-level language.

This release was checked for leaks and other memory issues. The couple of issues that turned up were fixed.

What is Marpa?

Marpa is an advance over recursive descent and yacc. I hope the Marpa algorithm will become the standard parser for problems too big for regular expressions.

When designing a Perl application that needs to run on many different versions I end up using 'corelist' a good deal. Most of the time I just needed a list of the additions or removals of core modules from different stable series of Perl releases. I kept all this information in a text file for reference. While searching for something Perl related it dawned on me that I should post this as it could be useful for other Perl developers as well.

I used 'corelist -r' and 'corelist -v ' to gather this data together. The release data is from 'perldoc perlhist'.

2008-12-14 Perl v5.8.9 released Pumpking: Nicholas Clark
2007-12-18 Perl v5.10.0 released Pumpking: Rafael Garcia-Suarez
2010-04-12 Perl v5.12.0 released Pumpking: Jesse Vincent
2011-05-14 Perl v5.14.0 released Pumpking: Jesse Vincent

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

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

You might have stumbled across Dist::Zilla's --trial command line option in the past, and maybe even used it for a developer CPAN release. Its effect is (as I understand it) two-fold:

• adds -TRIAL to the name of the distribution archive being produced
• sets release: testing in the META.json file which is parsed by CPAN services

It came to my attention that using -TRIAL is actually pretty bad for you and your system, and other users, even though it's one of the two naming conventions CPAN services use to identify developer releases.

The problem is that the actual $VERSION of your code is unaffected. This means once installed, you can't ask your computer the version of an installed distribution and work out from that whether it's a developer release, or not. A secondary issue is that in sites such as metacpan.org there's nothing really obvious about the release which highlights its status as "development", in the list of available versions.

feeling:
		NULL;

my @arrays_hurt;

calling'all &{*pointers};

print "out loud";
"he is dead";

segfault::the::airplanes;
void_the_system;
&mourn;

"entropy sucks";

Day #0, the Eve, is traditionally either a RejectConf or some other smaller event - and either way, we provide a room where you can drink and socialize. We also provide beer and some condiments. You can listen to the talks, or opt to only socialize:

We had a little problem with the check-in tonight (yours truly forgot to ALTER TABLE the production database and subsequently the webapp kept failing), but otherwise we had a GREAT turn out.

We met old friends, exchanged new ideas... Anyway, the REAL fun starts tomorrow!

Oh, and here are a few shots from the preparation earlier today. Total of about 40 people have signed up to help, so things went on very smoothly

And I'm already sore from the work. Going to be now.