We went through all the open PPC pull requests, with a goal of merging or closing as many of them as possible. The actual merging or closing will happen soon.
We merged PPC0025: “Perl 5 is Perl”.
We discussed some possible shortcomings of the PPC process and wrote down a few ideas for how we might address them. We intend to discuss these with the people originally involved with defining the PPC process.
We want to write PSC blog posts to put intentions and ideas on record for the future. We discussed topics for blog posts we want to post soon.
We discussed the structure of our meetings, to make sure we take care of our duties and avoid losing track of things.
This year's London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Without our sponsors this event would not happen and we would like to thank them.
Since its founding in 2000, CV-Library has relied on Perl as the backbone of its core operations. Today, as the UK’s leading independent job board, we host over 150,000 job postings and maintain a database of more than 20 million CVs.
For nearly 25 years, CV-Library has been a committed supporter of LPW and the Perl community. We're proud to reaffirm this dedication at the 2024 conference.
Our platform now integrates modern Perl with Go, leveraging Kubernetes for scalable deployments, alongside other cutting-edge technologies to ensure stability and reliability.
Our development team consistently delivers high-quality features through code reviews, automated tests, and continuous deployment. Additionally, we regularly contribute to free and open-source projects, including CPAN.
CV-Library offers remote opportunities for developers and testers at all levels. We encourage participation in community meetups and collaboration days. Feel free to introduce yourself to Mark or any member of our team at the event, or explore our current job openings here.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on October 13, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
Task 2: Luhn’s Algorithm
You are given a string $str containing digits (and possibly other characters which can be ignored). The last digit is the payload; consider it separately. Counting from the right, double the value of the first, third, etc. of the remaining digits.
For each value now greater than 9, sum its digits.
The correct check digit is that which, added to the sum of all values, would bring the total mod 10 to zero.
Return true if and only if the payload is equal to the correct check digit.
In my last post, I talked about some of the big things TPF (The Perl Foundation) does. This time, I'll discuss some of the smaller stuff I've handled at TPF, often with help from others, and my misses along the way. My opinions are my own.
White Camel Awards
The White Camel Awards, started by brian d foy in 1999, were created to honor Perl community contributors, who, like ninjas, do all the hard work but never seem to get noticed. brian personally picked the winners each year until he stepped down in 2018. While many people contribute to the Perl community, their efforts often fly under the radar. I mean, organize a Perl event every year and your name still wouldn't make it outside the venue. Tough, right?
In 2022, I took over the award with TPF, with brian's blessing, to keep this tradition alive.
We continued refining our plan for TLS in core. We will collect
feedback on its feasibility from the maintainers of the relevant
modules.
We reviewed the status of putting the apostrophe package separator
behind a feature and approved the PR.
We confirmed that we want to deprecate smartmatch with a feature. This
effectively means that we don’t plan for a “better smartmatch” at this
time (but it can still be pursued in future, by way of the air gap
strategy, if there is appetite). We will file an issue for this.
We agreed that “negative” features (rather than outright removal) is
our preferred way to deprecate historical Perl quirks as the language
continues to evolve.
We discussed our ongoing inadequacy at dealing with maintenance
releases. We wrote down next steps to get back on track, and also
started looking into capturing a checklist to document the process.
I gave the talk Maximizing Performance and Cost Efficiency in the Cloud at the Perl and Raku conference this year. Among others, it used data from a benchmarking comparison I did among dozens of VMs on various cloud providers, and I had promised I'd post the full report.
It took me quite a bit longer than expected due to both technical complications and some new releases I wanted to include that enlarged the scope, but here it is now. Should be useful if you want to get the best bang for buck on the cloud.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 29, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
Task 1: Closest Palindrome
You are given a string, $str, which is an integer.
Write a script to find out the closest palindrome, not including itself. If there are more than one then return the smallest.
The closest is defined as the absolute difference minimized between two integers.
You are given a string, $str.
Write a program to return the minimum number of steps required to make the given string very strong password. If it is already strong then return 0.
Criteria:
It must have at least 6 characters.
It must contains at least one lowercase letter, at least one upper case letter and at least one digit.
It shouldn’t contain 3 repeating characters in a row.
Following can be considered as one step:
Insert one character;
Delete one character;
Replace one character with another.
A Simplification
To make the algorithm simpler, let’s ignore deletion. Instead of deleting a character, we can always replace it with a character different to the original one and its neighbours (you can easily verify that it can’t break any of the three criteria: it doesn’t shorten the password, it doesn’t remove more characters than the deletion would have deleted, and it never creates repeating characters).
The Algorithm
Let’s keep a set of strings we need to check, we’ll call them the agenda. At the start of the program, the agenda contains the input string.
This week’s meeting was delayed by scheduling conflicts because we chose consistency and availability over partition tolerance. We spent the entire meeting working on the document we wanted to put together a month ago with our thoughts on the Perl version number, which we intend to publish very soon.
This year's London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Without our sponsors this event would not happen and we would like to thank them.
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This virtual Conference on December 18th, 2024 is being called in conjunction with the creation of the Science Perl Journal, Winter 2024 Issue.
We have 6 author committments from some very exciting topics, but we want more! The Summer Issue has 8 authors and is nearly 150 pages. We are looking to double the number of authors, doubling the number of pages is going to be a stretch :-).
DESCRIPTION
Christos Argyropoulos, MD, PhD. is our moderator for this virtual event, which is December 18th, 2024 - Perl's 37th birthday! At this event we will be announcing our Summer 2025 plans, which will include a 3rd Issue of the SPJ.
The following lengths will be accepted for publication and presentation:
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 22, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
Task 2: Valid Number
You are given a string, $str.
Write a script to find if it is a valid number.
Conditions for a valid number:
- An integer number followed by an optional exponent.
- A decimal number followed by an optional exponent.
- An integer number is defined with an optional sign '-' or '+' followed by digits.
Decimal Number:
A decimal number is defined with an optional sign '-' or '+' followed by one of the following definitions:
- Digits followed by a dot '.'.
- Digits followed by a dot '.' followed by digits.
- A dot '.' followed by digits.
We exchanged Perl (re)branding ideas with Olaf. We will be keeping in touch on that front.
We discussed the feedback on feature-guarding and unbundling apostrophe. We came up with a strategy to propose that we think should work, which will be posted on the relevant thread.
We discussed the fact that keeping the current smartmatch operator (as a feature) means we can’t have a meaningful air gap to prevent subtle bugs when moving to a future “good” smartmatch. This probably implies that we would be giving up on any future smart match operator, but there are usually better replacements.
This year's London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Without our sponsors this event would not happen and we would like to thank them, starting with our diamond sponsor:
Deriv, a leading online broker with 25 years in the industry, is proud to sponsor the London Perl & Raku Workshop 2024.
As a company with strong ties to the Open Source community, our connection to Perl is more than just practical—it's a passion. Over the years, we have actively used Modern Perl and contributed to shaping its future, including beta testing key developments like Object::Pad, which are crucial for advancing the language's capabilities.
Perl is the backbone of our back-end operations, proving to be a robust, reliable, and versatile language that meets our needs. Its community-driven growth, notably through CPAN, continually boosts its capabilities and reflects our values of collaboration and innovation.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 8, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
Task 1: No Connection
You are given a list of routes, @routes.
Write a script to find the destination with no further outgoing connection.
Example 1
Input: @routes = (["B","C"], ["D","B"], ["C","A"])
Output: "A"
"D" -> "B" -> "C" -> "A".
"B" -> "C" -> "A".
"C" -> "A".
"A".
We devised a strategy to deal with smartmatch, starting with reverting its removal. A separate email with details will follow.
We spent too much time talking about putting the apostrophe package separator behind a feature. That too will be outlined in a separate email. A github issue will follow.
We want to revert the open undef patch, for a variety of reasons, such as breaking autodie. We decided the steps to handle this.
Hi All! Given the number of talks submitted to this year's London Perl & Raku Workshop we have decided to reserve a third room in the venue. This will give us a bit more room on the schedule for talks, which is good as the other two rooms are now 90% full.
However, we would also like to use this third room for something else. Its capacity is relatively low, 15 people including the person presenting, so we feel it might be suitable for use as a breakout room / mini hackathon(s) / birds of a feather; and we will probably reserve two large slots for this. If you have an idea of something you'd like to use the room for then please get in touch with us.
Another way we can make more space for talks is to opt for lunch at the venue, this will free up space for three more talks. To do that we need a couple more sponsors so if you would like to help with that then please have a look at the options here: https://act.yapc.eu/lpw2024/sponsoring.html
The London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Thanks to this year's sponsors, without whom LPW would not happen:
The following script leaks memory in perl v5.40, and it did not in v5.38:
use Scalar::Util 'weaken';
my $z;
{
my $x;
my $y;
my sub my_sub {
$x = shift;
return sub { $y };
};
my $subscriber = {};
$subscriber->{foo} = my_sub($subscriber);
weaken($z = $subscriber);
}
say 'leak = ', int defined $z;
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on October 6, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
Task 1: Third Maximum
You are given an array of integers, @ints.
Write a script to find the third distinct maximum in the given array. If third maximum doesn’t exist then return the maximum number.
Example 1
Input: @ints = (5, 6, 4, 1)
Output: 4
The first distinct maximum is 6.
The second distinct maximum is 5.
The third distinct maximum is 4.
