Friday, October 06, 2006
Remembering Nick-Ing Simmons
Perl.com update
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Hello, Perl hackers and afficionadoes. You're reading the twice-a-month
Perl newsletter, the journal of our glorious revolution. The five-year
plan starts... now.
* Perl Events
YAPC::NA 2007 will take place in Houston, Texas, USA on 25 through 27
June:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/28/1251248
For all of the Belgian hackers in the audience, Vlaanderen.pm has just
begun:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/04/0050226
* Perl News
Nick Ing-Simmons was an early contributor to Perl 5. Aside from
impressive work on PerlIO, Tk, and Encode, Nick was the pumpking for Perl
5.003_02. In recent years, he was an indispensible font of information
about XS, the Perl internals, and the history of certain features.
Whatever he wrote, you knew you were getting the truth.
Sadly, Nick passed away far too young. The Perl community owes him a
great debt of gratitude:
http://news.perlfoundation.org/2006/09/thanks_nick.html
The Perl Review 3.0 is out:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/01/0413244
David Landgren has summarized the weeks in Perl 5:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/22/2131233
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/28/2131227
Ann Barcomb has summarized the weeks in Perl 6:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/01/147214
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/24/1355250
Your editor has provided minutes of the Perl 6 design meetings:
http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/31171
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/30/2331250
* 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. Often, you
don't have to know much about either project, or much beyond Perl 5.
This week, the Pugs tasks are:
In the world of Parrot, the RT queue has plenty of open tickets for you to
peruse:
http://xrl.us/owsd
* Perl on ORN
Shared-nothing is the way to go
<http://use.perl.org/~ziggy/journal/31211>. If you want your project to
grow to meet the needs of ever more users, the best option is to make it
easy to add more separate pieces of hardware. It's not the only option,
however; sometimes using hardware more effectively gives you bigger
benefits. Yogesh Makwana recently explored porting some of his company's
software to mod_perl just for performance benefits. They saw tremendous
improvement from using the right modules:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/apache/2006/09/28/httpd_scaling.html
Mark-Jason Dominus's "Design Patterns of 1972"
<http://newbabe.pobox.com/~mjd/blog/prog/design-patterns.html> has
garnered some attention. In particular, Jeremy Jones agreed with the
premise that repeated use of patterns in a language may be a sign of its
weakness:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/10/design_patterns_are_signs_of_w.html
... and also pondered the latest programming language popularity scores:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/09/python_supplants_c_on_tiobe_in.html
Your editor reviewed the almost-indispensible CPAN module
Test::Perl::Critic:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/09/cpan_module_review_testperlcri.html
... and also warned against following software development methods
halfheartedly:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/09/this_chocolate_cake_recipe_tas.html
Curtis Poe argued that building large systems often requires building
small systems with discipline:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/09/building_large_systems.html
... then criticized negligent software development:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/09/sue_the_bards.html
Upcoming articles include a peek inside the powerful new CGI::Application ecosystem.
hash bang eek ook,
- 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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