Perl has been around for a couple of years longer than Python and Linux. Perl 5 was released in 1993, the same year as FreeBSD and NetBSD.
In the 90's for Open Source projects the "community platforms" where Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists run on Listserv or Majordomo (Mailman didn't show up until 1999). IRC was used for text based chat but without SSL!. CVS was the open source version control system of choice or you might have been unlucky enough to use Visual Source Safe at work, whilst Subversion wouldn't show up until 2000.
But the 90's are more than 20 years in the past and IPv6 is actually seeing meaningful adoption now. Many of the above technologies are as completely foreign to people with 10+ years of industry experience as Compact Cassettes, VHS, LaserDisc and maybe CDs or even DVDs.
As people have embraced Git and even now IPv6 - we too can and must embrace newer platforms that offer a better experience for us humans as we work together on Perl related projects.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days from now (on September 17, 2023 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
Task 1: Common Characters
You are given an array of words made up of alphabetic characters only.
Write a script to return all alphabetic characters that show up in all words including duplicates.
To continue my previous post about Kephra, please let me ramble about just one seemingly little feature. It is interesting in its own right - but also an example for the design principles I employ:
1. max productivity
2. max consistency (less to memorize)
3. breaking habits and customs only when 1 and 2 demand it.
As soon graphics plays a greater role I will add max beauty as new 2.
Just like last year, I'm doing a dev release of Perl, this time version 5.37.6. And again
like last year, you can watch it live on Sunday 20th of November on Twitch:
You can expect to watch me talk through the steps of the Perl
Release Managers Guide and if you join the Twitch chat, or #p5p on irc.perl.org, we can chat a bit.
I assume I'll start Sunday at 09:00 UTC (11:00 CET), and the whole thing will
take around 4 hours unless there are some major mishaps.
Write a script to sort the given array in increasing order based on the frequency of the values. If multiple values have the same frequency then sort them in decreasing order.
Example 1
Input: @ints = (1,1,2,2,2,3)
Ouput: (3,1,1,2,2,2)
'3' has a frequency of 1
'1' has a frequency of 2
'2' has a frequency of 3
I was reading recently about some significant Python 3.11 performance improvements, and I was wondering whether Perl 5 still gets significant performance improvements on each version - even though it might be more mature, thus more optimized in the first place.
I thought I'd compare the final releases of alternating versions starting with 5.12.5 released 10 years ago, using a benchmark I made for a cloud vm comparison. As is the case with any benchmark, it might not be representative of your own workloads - it benchmarks things that are relevant to me and also some things that I would avoid, but are used by many modules and are notoriously slow (mainly DateTime and Moose). However, it is more representative of "real-life", with results that are not lost in noise, than say, PerlBench (which has a different purpose of course). Here is the list of the tested Perl releases:
We're trying out new ways to send out these regular announcements of what we get up to on the Perl Steering Council. This will be a regular posting that gives a brief summary of what we discussed in our weekly (or at least, near-weekly, give or take scheduling clashes) meetings.
Internals docs (such as perlguts, perlapi) could be done better, but it's unclear how. Some new documents might be useful, but there's a risk of spending too much time on obscure internal specifics that almost nobody will ever need to read about or touch.
Smartmatch deprecation continues. Philippe has sent patches to CPAN modules that may be affected. autodie still needs some further work.
(As alluded to by this very blog post) we discussed communication strategies for user-facing news announcements. Thoughts are to post here on blogs.perl.org and send links elsewhere - such as Twitter, Reddit, etc.. We don't have a good feel for where folks will find it, so we'll just have to adapt as we go.
The module_true branch which implements the RFC is now merged and will be default in use v5.38. This will mean you no longer need to remember that final 1; line at the end of your module file.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days from now (on September 10, 2023 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
Task 1: Similar Words
You are given an array of words made up of alphabets only.
Write a script to find the number of pairs of similar words. Two words are similar if they consist of the same characters.
Example 1
Input: @words = ("aba", "aabb", "abcd", "bac", "aabc")
Output: 2
Pair 1: similar words ("aba", "aabb")
Pair 2: similar words ("bac", "aabc")
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on August 27, 2023 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
Task 1: Min Max
You are given an array of distinct integers.
Write a script to find all elements that is neither minimum nor maximum. Return -1 if you can’t.
Example 1
Input: @ints = (3, 2, 1, 4)
Output: (3, 2)
The minimum is 1 and maximum is 4 in the given array. So (3, 2) is neither min nor max.
Juhuu, released Kephra 0.401 in the spirit release early - release often. It is the start of a complete rewrite. So it's back to zero: now it can only edit one file at a time and has only Perl highlighting and UTF-8 or ASCII encoding. But some of you will still want to use it (beside vi, emacs, VStudio or atom - I know) because of the comfort in basic editing it provides. The following article explains what I mean by that.
We briefly discussed conversion from C89 to C99. We think it's not really worth updating old code proactively, but definitely writing new code in modern style. If significant changes are being made within a function it might be worth updating the entire function to C99, but otherwise don't bother doing huge sweeping changes to entire files.
We talked about announcing the deprecation of smartmatch. We will work on wording for a new post and send that out soon, outlining our current plans.
Paul has a (draft) PR to add pluggable infix operators, but it still needs more additions before it's considered core-worthy