Monday, September 25, 2006
SOTO 10
Perl.com update
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Welcome to autumn or spring, Perl newsletter subscribers. (You try writing
for a global audience and see how hemisphere-inclusive your writing
becomes.) This is the Perl newsletter, a bi-weekly newsletter about Perl.
That's why we call it the Perl newsletter.
Here's what's news in the world of Perl.
* Perl Events
The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is tomorrow--23 September. It has almost
sold out. Register now:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/20/2022249
Damian Conway will be in Boston giving two free talks on Monday, 25
September:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/19/2257252
* Other Perl News
Josh McAdams and Perlcast interviewed your editor about the must-own,
must-buy, and must-review Perl Hacks. (Your editor was the lead author,
so take all of the imperatives in this paragraph very seriously.) Perlcast
will also give away several copies of the book, not that you don't have
two already.
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/15/1648231
David Landgren summarized the recent activity on the Perl 5 Porters list:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/09/2145224
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/15/127256
Ann Barcomb summarized the world of Perl 6 for the fortnight:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/10/142259
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/16/1957245
* Perl Jobs
The Pugs and Parrot projects each maintain a small list of tasks for
programmers interested in spending an hour or two helping out. You often
don't have to know much about either project or much beyond Perl 5.
This week, the Pugs tasks are:
Hack examples/network/evalbot/evalbot-loop and have it report on IRC
when a build fails, perhaps by sending a special message down the pipe
(see set_nick), and save the build log somewhere.
Smartlink more tests to Synopses: See
http://rakudo.org/perl6/index.cgi?smart_linking for how, and
http://spec.pugscode.org/ is the current result. (Also
http://smoke.pugscode.org/ is linked to the spec as well.)
In the world of Parrot, the RT queue has plenty of open tickets for you
to peruse:
http://xrl.us/owsd
In particular, good places to start include fixing sprintf()
<http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=40253>
and changing Parrot's exception calls in C code
<http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=40392>.
Much appreciation goes to Paul Cochrane, who has completed several tasks
related to coding standards and file cleanup. Great work!
* Perl on ORN
Ever since the first Perl Conference, way back in the mists of time, Larry
Wall has given an annual address called the State of the Onion. Sometimes
they're about Perl. This summer marked the tenth anniversary of the State
of the Onion, and Perl.com has the text--and, this year, the
photographs--by which Larry explained how his teenaged project is becoming
an adult:
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/09/21/onion.html
Your editor found a wonderful account of going from lurker to contributor
and how Audrey Tang's Pugs project made that frictionless:
http://use.perl.org/~rodi/journal/30985
James Shore shared an experience of voluntarily and knowingly acquiring
technical debt for a good business reason, and then paying it back down
with interest:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/09/voluntary_technical_debt.html
Jim Thomason gave an account of taking four years to build a templating
systems--something that seems so simple, you can do it very badly in an hour:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/09/build_your_own_templating_syst.html
Meanwhile, Perl quality improves, bugs get fixed, new features appear, and
it's just a great time to be a programmer.
Until next time,
- c
chromatic@oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera
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*** Featured Articles ***
The State of the Onion 10
In Larry Wall's tenth annual State of the Onion address, he talks about
raising children and programming languages and balancing competing
tensions and irreconcilable desires.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/09/21/onion.html
***
Generating UML and Sequence Diagrams
Sometimes a picture can save you thousands of words of description--and
debugging. A sequence diagram shows the flow of methods and function calls
between modules. Perl lets you generate these almost automatically for
Perl code--or even Java. Phil Crow shows how to use UML::Sequence.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/08/03/sequence-diagrams.html
***
Still More Perl Lightning Articles
Perl lightning articles are short, direct, and full of electrifying
practical information. This time, Steven Philip Schubiger demonstrates how
to convert crufty MakeMaker installation scripts into shiny pure-Perl
installers, Phil Crow demonstrates the use of Java's powerful Swing UI
toolkit from Perl, Joshua McAdams explains how to turn any module into a
script, and chromatic removes duplication from test suites.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/07/13/lightning-articles.html
***
FEAR-less Site Scraping
Many web programmers talk about "domain-specific languages" as if defining
functions and methods were a new discovery. A real domain-specific
language provides concise syntax and symatics for a particular purpose,
such as Yung-chung Lin's FEAR::API. He explains how this toolkit allows
you to scrape, modify, store, and re-present web data easily, effectively,
and economically.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/06/01/fear-api.html
***
Charting Data at the Bottom of the World
Alex Gough has a curious job. He's the only programmer for 500 miles at a
remote Antarctic research station. His problems are like your problems
too, though--gathering, manipulating, recording, and displaying data.
Here's how he uses several CPAN modules to make pretty charts and graphs
with almost no work.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/05/04/charting-data.html
***
Unraveling Code with the Debugger
Reading other people's code can be difficult, especially if you have no
idea what happens when and where. Understanding code flow is vital to
maintenance and bug fixes, but littering code with print and debugging
statements is tedious and prone to error. There's another way: use the
debugger! Daniel Allen demonstrates how to pinpoint a problem with Perl's
debugger.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/04/06/debugger.html
***
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