Friday, November 03, 2006
Hashes and Patchmonsters
Perl.com update
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Good afternoon, Perl newsletter subscribers. Suddenly it's November again
and 2005 seems so long ago (which is fine, because 2007 seems like far,
far in the future). This biweekly mailing summarizes the latest news in
the Perl world, especially the parts visible to the O'Reilly Network.
Here's what happened this fortnight.
* Perl Events
The Chicago Perl Hackathon starts in one week. Midwesterners, you still
have plenty of time to make your plans. The rest of us (besides perhaps
Schwern and Ingy dot Net) should have made our plans by now.
http://hackathon.info/
* Perl News
If you've been to a Perl conference in North America in the past few
years, you undoubtedly will recognize Bill Odom. The world's nicest man
is also the president of the Perl Foundation and a passionate advocate for
effective and open technology. Perlcast recently interviewed Bill. Set
aside an hour to hear what's on his mind:
http://www.perlcast.com/audio/Perlcast_Interview_034.mp3
Catalyst users in Japan now have their own Planet Catalyst in Japanese.
(Your editor hears that Catalyst is big in Belgium, too):
http://planet.catalystframework.org/jp/
David Landgren has summarized the weeks in Perl 5:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/27/1146224
Ann Barcomb has summarized the weeks in Perl 6:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/22/1236207
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/29/1326232
Your editor has minuted the Perl 6 design meetings:
http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/31493
http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/31502
* 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.
In the world of Parrot, the best and brightest task this week is, yet
again, to choose a portion of a Parrot Design Document, read through it,
and make sure it has comprehensive tests. You need to know little more
than Perl and English to accomplish this. If you have a couple of hours
free and this sounds interesting, send a message to
parrot-porters@perl.org or ask in #parrot on irc.perl.org.
* Perl on ORN
If, since you discovered Perl, you've had to program in a language without
support for hashes, you know how powerful hashes are for making even small
problems more tractable. Yet they may be even more powerful than you
could imagine. Simon Cozens, Perl.com editor emeritus, cataloged a
handful of powerful hash-use patterns in Hash Crash Course. Improve the
way you think about the basics of Perl:
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/11/02/all-about-hashes.html
Python 2.5 came out, stealing a few good ideas from Perl 6:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2006/10/26/python-25.html
Your editor glued a parrot to a camel and remembered why he hates to write
cross-platform and cross-compiler C code:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/11/fun_with_crossplatform_shared.html
... and found one of the world's worst metrics for measuring programming
language productivity:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/10/lies_sloc_lies_and_advocacy_st.html
Curtis Poe announced the Perl Foundation's regular Call for Grant Proposals:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/11/tpf_calls_for_proposals.html
Victor Rodriguez finally made Parrot patchmonster Leo Toetsch sit down
long enough to answer ten questions:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/10/people_of_perl_leopold_toetsch.html
Packing for the Hackathon,
- c
chromatic@oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera
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*** Featured Articles ***
Hash Crash Course
Most explanations of hashes use the metaphor of a dictionary. Most
real-world code uses hashes for far different purposes. Simon Cozens
explores some patterns of hashes for counting, uniqueness, caching,
searching, set operations, and dispatching.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/11/02/all-about-hashes.html
***
Rapid Website Development with CGI::Application
Perl has a wealth of good web frameworks. One of the season's toolkits,
CGI::Application, has recently seen a bout of new development to make
building web apps faster and much easier. Mark Stosberg demonstrates these
new features and how to use them.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/10/19/cgi_application.html
***
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
***
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