I've always liked Prolog as a programming language. Something about the way the language works (like the built-in backtracking) appeals to my nature, much like Perl's proclivity for linguistic floridity. Thus, I've decided to try my hand at writing a Prolog compiler for the Parrot VM.
To try to suppress my natural tendency to move from subject to subject (being a fox and not a hedgehog) I'm going to keep a development diary here. Also, I've found that the documentation on implementing HLLs with Parrot is either thin on the ground or a bit dated. So hopefully some of my scribblings turn out to be useful to someone else.
I upset a lot of people with my Perl 5 is Dying post. In fact, that is far and away one of the most heavily cited posts I have. I made people mad at me. I made a lot of people talk. While I'm sorry I made people mad (and I've had some blunt comments directed at me in pubs as a result), I'm very proud of that post. It got a lot of people arguing and thinking and I like to believe it spurred a few people (well, me at least) to do something about it. Here are just a few things which have been happening to turn things around (I am not taking credit for this. Many of these things would have happened any way and I was simply one of many people pointing out the problem).
I just saw this posting about the best Perl development firm. There is an entry on Online PR news and some kind of a listing on the website of "Best Web Design Agencies".
Does anyone know any of these companies or is this just pure SEO and I just gave them more ranking?
If this patch gets applied doing killall onion on 5.14 will get you a dead process instead of onion: no process found, the same goes for ps(1) and top(1) which read the legacy process name by default. Before this patch the behavior of $0 assignment on Linux hadn't changed since perl 4.000 came out.
It appears that there was a touch of confusion and I have been accepted as a speaker at OSCON. I'll be giving the roles talk, but with some adjustments for bits that were a touch confusing. No matter how perfect the example is, using the B:: hierarchy to show multiple inheritance problems just distracts. Not only will this allow me to focus on easier examples, it will also leave more time for questions.
I used to encourage people to help CPAN Increase its Schwartz by making the ratio of the byte size of just the latest versions to all versions as high as possible. It's time to increase the schwartz again. Think of it as Spring cleaning (Autumn for you southern folks) for your CPAN directory.
Many people are arguing on the CPAN workers mailing list about who's opinion about rsyncing mirrors is the most worthy. While they huff and puff, you can help with just a couple minutes of your time.
Infinoid's svn-bisect, now at 1.0, provides a 'run' option, just like git bisect. This is the only feature I had that he did not, and he provides many more, including a nicer API (based on git's), and smarter binary search (only searching those revisions involved in the folder you're working in.)
If you're using subversion, I highly recommend giving his tool a try.
DynaLoader is a portable high-level interface around you OS's dynamic library loading. It's the code that's loading your XS modules. It's actually doing a pretty good job at that. You may wonder then why I consider its use harmful.
If all you want to do is load the XS part of your module, it's the wrong tool for the job. Most of all because it has a truly awful interface. It requires you to inherit your module from it. It's common knowledge that public inheritance from an implementation detail is a really bad idea. It breaks not only encapsulation rather badly, but also violates separation of concerns.
This would be as bad as it is if DynaLoader didn't use AutoLoader. Because of this, when you call some undefined method on an instance of a class that derives from DynaLoader you don't get this error:
Can't locate object method "undefined_method" via package "Foo"
Today having Internet access has become more of a necessity than a luxe. Internet is so common nowadays that we all have it at home and use it with all computers and even our home appliances: tv, mp3 players, tablets and game consoles. It's no sercert that Internet is everywhere and is here to stay
I remember when I had my first Internet connection at home that it was meant to be used for a single computer in the house. Using a router was not allowed by my ISP. Today not only is it allowed but most ISP even provide a modem/router with WIFI to all their clients!
First off, I'd like to thank God (the whole Earth is filled with his glory) for this promotion. I was just a Seraph, doing my normal PR work, but somehow God (holy, holy, holy and all that) noticed me and decided it was time to give me a bit more responsibility. Of course, being untested, he couldn't put me in charge of something as important as the US Senate or something like that, so he gave me Africa. After all, if I screw up there, who's going to notice? Naturally, I screwed up. I saw something wrong and I decided to fix it.
Marpa::HTML
is a high-level HTML parser, built on top of
the very high-quality
HTML::Parser
module.
Why bother with high-level parsing,
especially if it means layering one parser on top of another?
Unfortunately David Golden, Ricardo Signes and Barbie can not make it.
We accepted two last-minute requests from Miyagawa and Gabor Szabo.
There was a tiny problem with the hotel, which luckily got spotted by Ovid. We have fixed that problem now.
We will meet next week (during the monthly Vienna.pm meeting which will from now on take place on the first Thursday each month) to discuss the agenda etc.
Both of my proposals for OSCON were turned down, so I won't be able to make it this year. The BBC is also feeling the financial crunch, so international conferences are harder to manage. I'm not terribly disappointed, but it would have been nice to see my beloved Portland again. Fortunately, with my wedding in June, a number of my close friends from Portland will be in London. If you can't bring Ovid to Portland, bring Portland to Ovid.
In addition to The Perl Foundation being accepted into GSoC 2010, BioPerl is now also part of the Google Summer of Code! The Open Bioinformatics Foundation, which also includes BioPython, BioRuby, and others, has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code for 2010. We are actively looking for students interested in OBF-related bioinformatics projects; new ideas are welcome. Project ideas and other details can be found here:
This isn't the first year BioPerl has been part of GSoC. A successful project was recently published by 2008 GSoC student Mira Han for developing a phyloXML parser for BioPerl.
Update: Rough project idea for use of Modern Perl tools or Perl 6 with BioPerl now added.
Each year, Google offers students the opportunity to spend their summer coding on open source projects. You propose a project, and if selected, you're assigned a mentor and provided a $4500 stipend. It is a competitive program to get into, but offers an amazing amount of real-world experience and the ability to get seriously involved in an open source project of your choosing. The Perl Foundation spans a wide variety of projects including Perl 5, Perl 6, and Parrot with many great mentors knowledgeable in areas ranging from language design, virtual machines, and compilers through web and desktop applications. This program is a great chance to get more involved in the Perl community and put a substantial project worth of source code in your portfolio.
Adam Kennedy's recent post on threads in Padre reminded me to post about an experiment of mine. Last year I learned some Erlang. I really liked their model of multi-threading: many threads that share no data at all and communicate through message queues. A lot of other things where really annoying though, specially their crappy support for strings and lack of libraries in general. I kept thinking I want perl with these threads, so I started implementing it. And thus threads::lite was born.
The main difference between threads::lite and threads.pm is that t::l starts an entirely new interpreter instead of cloning the existing one. If you've loaded a lot of modules, that can be significantly quicker and leaner than cloning. As an optimization, it supports cloning itself right after module loading, so you can quickly start a large number of identical threads. Threads can be monitored, so that on thread death their send an exit code to their listeners.
What are your options when you would like to deploy an application written in Perl using the Catalyst MVC framework? Is the most advanced option to rent a dedicated server, install everything yourself and go?
Are there companies that offer ready-made dedicated or virtual servers with Catalyst and mod_perl already configured? I found a list of hosting companies on the Catalyst web site (though it was not linked from the main page) but as I can see none of them ready-made solution.
I am not in the web application building business but I wonder if it would not make sense to have a web hosting offering with a turn-key Catalyst environment and even with a small demo application already running?
It could be as simple as a standard dedicated server (or VPS) with all the necessary packages already installed and Apache configured.
