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Perl is far from dead/dying nowadays, with 5.12 being released recently, and the yearly timed-based release plan and all. In fact, just after I start to be comfortable using some of the 5.10 niceties, here comes a whole new version with even more niceties waiting to be explored!

Features in 5.10 I'm using regularly.

Defined-or (if there's only one feature I can have in 5.10, I pick this one).

State variables (love it!).

Features in 5.10 I'm starting to use.

-E switch (but my reflex still says -e all the time).

Recursive pattern in regex (e.g., via Regexp::Grammars).

say() (maybe if I say it often enough I'll start to say say more).

Features in 5.10 I rarely/ever touch.

Smart match (I know it's a godsend, but strangely I never feel the need for it so far).

given/when (I'm sticking with if/elsif/else, especially since given/when cannot be used as an expression yet).

OH YEAH!

Just finished installing the brand spanking new Perl 5.12 on the netbook on my "perl" account, with which I tested already earlier -RC releases with my personal code.

It's fair to say that the user experience has gone a long way from the "old days" of manual configuration, installation, swearing and $ENV madness. Hell, one doesn't even need local::lib anymore!

All I had to do to test 5.12 after creating my "perl" account was:

Perl 5 core development was in a downward spiral for a couple of years. Releases happened less and less frequently, the number of contributors dropped and the general outlook was getting worse and worse. For the Perl 5.12 release I wrote a post on the ActiveState blog how the downward trend has been reversed and how fun, optimism and even excitement has returned to Perl 5 language development.

I actually don't believe there isn't something like this in CPAN yet. Well, actually there is PHP::Var, but it has bugs, doesn't handle scalars, and doesn't do recursive structure. But then I am equally surprised to be able to hack Data::Dump::PHP in just a couple of hours, by blatantly copying from Gisle Aas' Data::Dump and just modifying only what's necessary.

And another note, PHP's var_export() currently can't dump recursive structures, which Data::Dump::PHP can.

There are some tests which pass, but routinely fail in the debugger. Here's one example:

This is the video from the final stand-up on everyone's progress for the entire 2010 Vienna Perl QA Workshop.

Module versions can be found using several ways. I know two.

You can use the module in a one liner and print the module's $VERSION variable:
perl -MSVG -le'print $SVG::VERSION'

This gets annoying when the module name gets long:
perl -MWWW::Mechanize -le'print $WWW::Mechanize::VERSION'

Or the insane:
perl -MPOE::Component::WWW::Pastebin::Bot::Pastebot::Create -le'print $POE::Component::WWW::Pastebin::Bot::Pastebot::Create::VERSION'

Another method I've seen people use is to actually cause an error. Try to load the module in a high version that doesn't exist. The error will show what version it is:
perl -MWWW::Mechanize\ 9999
perl -MPOE::Component::WWW::PasteBin::Bot::Pastebot::Create\ 9999

This is pretty good, since it's short to write and most likely you won't find many versions above 9999 (except perhaps, File::Slurp - last version 9999.13). However, this is a bit confusing to newbies, trying to cause an error on purpose to simply find the version.

Moreover, since it causes a compilation error, you can't easily check multiple versions.

For various reasons I was only able to attend a few hours in the moring, and all of that time was spent organising stuff (even though most of the organising is done by daxim and pst). At least I took some photos:

In the evening I joined the rest of the attendees again at Der Wiener Deewan for delicious pakistani food, sponsored by 123people.

For the syntax and semantics of Prolog, Parrotlog is based on a draft of the ISO/IEC Prolog standard (seeing how the actual standard costs muchos dineros).

Now, the good news are that the Prolog spec is actually an operator precedence grammar, which happens to be how NQP does its expression parsing as well. The bad news are that the spec uses term for everything, while NQP makes a distinction between terms (atomic expressions) and expressions (expressions, with or without operators). This means that I have to figure out if I should use term or EXPR whenever the spec says term. Let's see how deep the rabbit hole is.

I had been looking around for the ancient Perl sources to add to my collection, but Schwern told me that they are already in the Perl git repository. I just have to checkout the correct tag:

$ git tag -l
perl-1.0
perl-1.0.15
perl-1.0.16
perl-2.0
perl-2.001
perl-3.000
perl-3.044
perl-4.0.00
perl-4.0.36

Now I just need to get these to compile on my MacBook Air.

I've suggested that Schwern needs to make a git archive of the internets now.

A few folks have talked about adding tags to Test::Class. This would allow us to do things like load 'customer' fixtures if something is tagged 'customer', or only run tests tagged 'model'.

Here's what I have working now:

I tried connecting to github again via our strict firewall and http_proxy, which only allows 443 and 80.
corkscrew and simplier proxy tools do not work, and my machine which has 443 redirector had a harddisc crash, so I fixed connect by Shun-ichi Goto
at http://www.taiyo.co.jp/~gotoh/ssh/connect.c
See http://www.taiyo.co.jp/~gotoh/ssh/connect.html

Our squid balances between several session servers so I needed to add realm support.
That was easy. See http://gist.github.com/360940

ProxyCommand connect -d -d -H proxy:8080 %h %p Host github.com User rurban Port 22 Hostname github.com IdentityFile ~/.ssh/proxy TCPKeepAlive yes IdentitiesOnly yes

Host ssh.github.com
User rurban
Port 443
Hostname ssh.github.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/proxy1
TCPKeepAlive yes
IdentitiesOnly yes

[remote "origin"] fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* url = http://github.com/mirrors/perl.git

The new and shiny oe1.orf.at is finally online!

As you might expect it's crafted using the finest ingredients of Modern Perl: Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose, HTML::FormHandler, KinoSearch. Relaunching the site was a nice project, even though there were some setbacks:

I was forced to switch from Postgres to MySQL (using - the horrors - MyISAM), so I couldn't use any real database features like transactions and referential integrity; the launch date was postponed a few times, so I couldn't help organising the QA Hackathon as much as I wanted (in fact I can also not attend all days, because I want to spend some time with my family before leaving for Berlin / Icleand).

Anyway, after fixing some last post-deployment glitches everything seems to work now. Yay!

This is the video from the morning stand-up on everyone's progress for the second day of the 2010 Vienna Perl QA Workshop.

Last day of the hackathon and things are going well. We're doing enough yak-shaving that I think it should be called a Yakathon, but that's a separate issue.

March has been a very busy time. Although we weren't able to meet the 1st March deadline, the switch to the HTTP submission process has started. Currently it's still considered Beta, but initial problems appear to have been worked out, and the Metabase is receiving reports thick and fast. So much so that some testers started to ramp up their smoker bots again, forgetting that some were still submitting SMTP reports. You can read David Golden's report of his beta test update.

The following is a brief summary of my Perl introduction/promotion talk at BarCamp Kerala 8, held in March 28th, 2010 at Tiruvalla, Kerala, India.

It was my first BarCamp, and the first other conference/camp that I ever attended apart from last year's YAPC::EU::2009 (which was a great experience, by the way!). I was very interested in having Perl promoted among a community that uses/promotes other programming languages. So, I thought of giving a talk and selected the title 'Y Perl?'. The talk concentrated on why Perl should be considered when there are myriad programming languages. Highlights were on the latest buzzwords in Perl, namely Catalyst, Moose and Padre, the community efforts such as Send-a-Newbie, Perl Monks and Perl Mongers.

Blog posts, pictures and tweets have been made on the session. You can find some at: http://bit.ly/brt0KV.

And, most of all, some people met me, expressing their interest in learning the Perl language. I am glad that I was able to encourage them to start taking up Perl. :-)

I am also intending to attend other camps/conferences (near and far), with the same motto of introducing/promoting Perl.

At the end of last week, I sent mail to all CPAN authors letting them know that they could delete older distributions from author directories. CPAN is pretty large: last week it was almost 8 GB, and today it's almost down to 7 GB. That puts the Schwartz Factor at about 1/7th. We can do better.

It's not the size that's the problem so much: disk is cheap (still, no need to waste it). The more distributions CPAN stores, the more the masters need to check when a mirror wants to rsync. For the most part, mirrors only need to delete the files that disappeared and want the ones that appeared. The other files (aside from the PAUSE files such as CHECKSUMS) should not have changed. The rsync program doesn't know anything special about CPAN though, so it still does all its work.

I always forget how to do this, so this is just Google fodder.

If I want to checkout a branch from someone else's repository:

git checkout -t -b $local_branch_name $remote_branch_name

The '-t' option says "track the remote branch from my branch". The '-b' option says to actually create the branch with the given name (name will be derived from $remote_branch_name if omitted).

It's so simple that I don't know why I forget this, but I do. Now that I've posted this, I probably won't forget it again :)