In the name of "Create great things (in Perl)"
You may have noticed my commentary on the Perl version number debate. I think that that debate is a possible way of raising the profile of the language we love, but that’s not why I called.
chromatic petdance and I’m sure others have suggested that rather than infight (which I don’t believe I’m doing, btw) is to make something great and show it off. While I don’t think this is enough to raise Perl’s profile ourside of our community, I have seen and IMHO done some very cool things this week:
Things I’ve Seen
- play-perl - A social coding game
- TryPerl - An online IDE for writing and running Perl scripts (per the author, it might still need a little help). This is a “try before you install” solution.
- Farabi - A CPAN installable browser-based Perl IDE.
- PerlTuts - An interactive “learn as you go” introduction to Perl
Things I’ve Done
- Demonstate non-blocking websocket file uploads (for eventual use in Galileo)
- Played with Lvalue accessors. Should it be a MooseX module?
It may not be enough, but its always nice to share what you and others are doing. Go Perl!
As I delve into the deeper Perl magic I like to share what I can.
These are nice things and it is very important to make it easier to try Perl and learn Perl and as you might know I spent some energy on that, but if you would like to generate interest create tools and products for people who are not using Perl.
Among the ones listed I think Galileo is far the best for this and while Play Perl itself is for Perl, the technology behind it can be used for other things as well. I think someone already tried to set it up for some non-Perl stuff. I see a nice opportunity there.
May I suggest that your next step is to buy a domain for Galileo and create its own web page. Then set up a Galileo based blog for yourself and start writing there. (or there too.) I promise, I’ll try to help you promote it.
Gabor, I’m touched to hear that you think so highly of Galileo (?: my fully CPAN installable CMS). I have just a few more bugs to iron out, but once my file-upload mechanism goes in, I think I will make a big version number bump (its nice to be able to do that whenever I want to) and make a bigger publicity push. When that happens I will be sure to let you know!
Also I do have a crippled demo on heroku: http://galileo-cms.herokuapp.com , but yeah, its needs a real domain name!
I don’t think we need to specifically write stuff for people who are not using Perl. If you build something with wide enough appeal, people will come use it.
Example 1: Rails. Rails put Ruby on the map in a big way, but it wasn’t aimed at outsiders.
Example 2: WWW::Mechanize seems to have brought people to using Perl that wouldn’t have used it before. Looking through Mech-related questions on StackOverflow, there sure seem to be many from people who are pretty new to our world.
Example 3: WordPress seems to have made PHP hackers out of people who would never have delved into the guts of it before.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t keep evangelism in mind with our code. I’ve always required ack to be able to run on Windows because I want Windows folks to know about the power of good command-line tools, and if they become aware of Perl, so much the better. And of course without the dead-simple install of Strawberry Perl, that wouldn’t be possible, either.
Hey I’m pretty excited you mentioned TryPerl :) I’m the author.
The day I booked the domain, a few months ago, I didn’t know perl or anything about linux, the whole project was : a challenge to develop something difficult in a new language/platform.
As such there are some obvious things I might be missing. Any suggestions etc will be taken well.
If you are new to Perl, the one thing I will say is, be careful how TryPerl executes code on your server. The difficulties of these kinds of applications is that if someone does some malicious system call, your server could be vulnerable. Other than that I look forward to see TryPerl’s progress and will offer you what advice I can!
Just a quick update.
TryPerl was down for sometime. I was doing other things. It is back online but I still don’t have a full proof solution. I plan to gather more experience with C and debuggers and I’m sure I will make it.
It has been done before so I can definitely do it :)
The repository is on github: https://github.com/gideondsouza/tryperl
Speaking of creating things in the name of perl, I also created http:www.perlmonksflair.com to add some much needed flair for the folks on that site :D This project is also on github.