2009-06-26

• 20:18 UTC Search your perl documentation w/ perldoc-search
  With the perldoc-search program, you can easily search all your perl documentation to find where that elusive "add_build_element" method is documented.When I say this: perldoc-search add_build_element I get this: perltoc - perl documentation table of contentsModule::Build::API - API Reference for Module AuthorsModule::Build::Cookbook - Examples of Module::Build Usage

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• 20:17 UTC Baltic Perl Workshop
  I would like to announce the pilot Perl event in Baltic States: Baltic Perl Workshop 2009.It happens on 21st of November, 2009 in Riga, the capital of Latvia.Venue is located in the beautiful center of Old Town. Konventa hotel offers special price for attendees of Baltic Perl Workshop: 50 € per night (single or double room).Please consider attending first ever Baltic Perl Workshop (there will be no more first one). Talk submissions are open. The workshop is free.

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2009-06-21

• 14:22 UTC Perl 6 Design Minutes for 06 June 2009
  The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 06 May 2009. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.

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• 14:21 UTC Rakudo Perl 6 development release #18
  On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the June 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #18 "Pittsburgh". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine. The tarball for the June 2009 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads . Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the frequent addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we continue to recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtain the latest source directly from the main repository at github. More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo . Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code named after a Perl Mongers group. This release is named "Pittsburgh", which is the host for YAPC|10 (YAPC::NA 2009) and the Parrot Virtual Machine Workshop. Pittsburgh.pm has also sponsored hackathons for Rakudo Perl as part of the 2008 Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. In this release of Rakudo Perl, we've focused our efforts on refactoring many of Rakudo's internals; these refactors improve performance, bring us closer to the Perl 6 specification, operate more cleanly with Parrot, and provide a stronger foundation for features to be implemented in the near future. Some of the specific major changes and improvements in this release include: Rakudo is now passing 11,536 spectests, an increase of 194 passing tests since the May 2009 release. With this release Rakudo is now passing 68% of the available spectest suite. Method dispatch has been substantially refactored; the new dispatcher is significantly faster and follows the Perl 6 specification more closely. Object initialization via the BUILD and CREATE (sub)methods is substantially improved. All return values are now type checked (previously only explicit 'return' statements would perform type checking). String handling is significantly improved: fewer Unicode-related bugs exist, and parsing speed is greatly improved for some programs containing characters in the Latin-1 set. The IO .lines and .get methods now follow the specification more closely. User-defined operators now also receive some of their associated meta variants. The 'is export' trait has been improved; more builtin functions and methods can be written in Perl 6 instead of PIR. Many Parrot changes have improved performance and reduced overall memory leaks (although there's still much more improvement needed). The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Perl possible. If you would like to contribute, see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help , ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode. The next release of Rakudo (#19) is scheduled for July 23, 2009. A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 is available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudo development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month. Have fun! References: [1] Parrot, http://parrot.org/ [2] YAPC|10 http://yapc10.org/yn2009/ [3] Parrot Virtual Machine Workshop, http://yapc10.org/yn2009/talk/2045 [4] Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, http://pghpw.org/ppw2008/

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2009-05-28

• 23:12 UTC Rakudo Perl 6 development release #17
  On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the May 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #17 "Stockholm". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1]. The tarball for the May 2009 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads . Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the frequent addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we continue to recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtain the latest source directly from the main repository at github. More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo . Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code named after a Perl Mongers group. This release is named "Stockholm"; Stockholm Perl Mongers will be holding a Perl 6 hackathon on May 29 [3]. Perl 6 developer Carl Mäsak is a member of Stockholm Perl Mongers and a main author of November [4], Druid [5], proto [6], and other Perl 6-based packages. Carl also contributes patches to Rakudo, and has been stress-testing Rakudo over the past year, submitting nearly 400 bug reports. In this release of Rakudo Perl, we've made the following major changes and improvements: Rakudo is now passing 11,342 spectests, an increase of 875 passing tests since the April 2009 release. With this release Rakudo is now passing 68% of the available spectest suite. We now have an updated docs/ROADMAP . Errors and stack traces now report the file name and line number in the original source code. Some custom operators can be defined, and it's possible to refer to operators using &infix:<op> syntax. We can start to load libraries written in other Parrot languages. Regexes now produce a Regex sub. More builtin functions and methods have been rewritten in Perl 6 and placed as part of the setting. There are many additional improvements and features in this release, see docs/ChangeLog for a more complete list. The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Perl possible. If you would like to contribute, see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help , ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode. The next release of Rakudo (#18) is scheduled for June 18, 2009. A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 is available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudo development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month. Have fun! References: [1] Parrot, http://parrot.org/ [2] Stockholm.pm, http://sthlm.pm.org/ [3] Stockholm Perl 6 hackathon, http://vic20.blipp.com/pipermail/kameler/2009-May/000318.html [4] November wiki engine, http://github.com/viklund/november/ [5] Druid, http://github.com/masak/druid/ [6] Proto, http://github.com/masak/proto/

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2009-05-26

• 14:35 UTC White Camel Awards 2009
  dha writes "Every year the White Camels are presented for service to the Perl community. If you look at the previous winners, you'll notice that these are mostly unsung heroes, like previous awardee Eric Cholet, the human moderator of so many Perl mailing lists, or Jay Hannah, one of the people running pm.org (if you ever created/maintained a pm group, chances are that Jay walked you through the process). Some of these people may be well known, like Allison Randal or Randal Schwartz, while others may be complete strangers to at least part of the globe, like Josh McAdams or Jay. Some of them may be extreme Perl hackers who created the original JAPH, but they actually received this award as a recognition for their community contributions to Perl rather than for their programming ability. That's not to say a great hacker can't receive the award, but you don't have to be one in order to be eligible. That being said, the nomination process for the 2009 White Camels is now open. If you think there's someone who deserves a White Camel, this is the time for you to send in your nominations. Send them to whitecamel-suggestions@perl.org, if possible with a subject along the lines of "White Camel Nomination :: $name". Make sure you properly identify the nominee and tell us why you think that's a worthy nomination. Don't go thinking "nah, somebody else will do it" because: a) everybody else may be thinking the same, and b) you may state your case differently than the next person. We'll be receiving nominations until June 21, 2009, by midnight, but don't wait up or you'll forget. Do it now!"

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2009-05-19

• 12:30 UTC Beta-testing the .msi installer for Strawberry Pe
  I've created some "Beta-test" MSI installers for Strawberry Perl - they're available at http://csjewell.comyr.com/perl/strawberryperlbeta.html for you to test out, hammer on, etc.If more people do this than just me, July's Strawberry Perl will hopefully be just great!For production Perl programming environments, you'll still probably want to go to http://strawberryperl.com/ (or to ActiveState, if that works for you) to get your Perl fix on Windows.Otherwise, let me know of any problems you have!

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• 07:20 UTC Reserve your YAPC|10 rooms by May 19th
  ehdonhon writes "Planning on staying on campus for YAPC|10? Make sure you reserve your room prior to May 19th. After that date, we no longer have an exclusive hold on the rooms and other events can end up taking our rooms. For more information on YAPC::NA housing, look on the YAPC|10 website at yapc10.org."

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2009-05-12

• 14:16 UTC The Programming Language with the happiest users
  huguei writes "Dolores Labs, who drives internet behaviour studies, did a research about the programming language with the happiest users, using tweets that matched "X language", and looked if it seemed positive, negative or neutral. Guess which one was the language with the happiest users ;)"

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2009-04-30

• 17:07 UTC Request for Comment: TPF to engage Richard Dice on 6 month contract for Perl community development
  Earlier this past week I submitted a proposal to the TPF Board of Directors; the PDF of this proposal is attached here. The plan includes a long list of projects, most of which have been discussed within TPF for a while but have been on indefinite hold due mainly to lack of available effort to address them properly. Some are for TPF process improvement and others are in more direct support of the Perl community. The essence of plan is that I be employed on contract by TPF for the next 6 months working on this list.The funding for this plan comes from the Ian Hague donation. The proposal I gave Mr. Hague last year featured a division of it into two halves of $100k each: one for p6 development, the other for TPF organization building, which explicitly included the option to fund paid TPF staff. So, we have the money and the blessing of the funder for it to be used in this way. The requested amount in my proposal to TPF is US$5k/month * 6 months = US$30k. This monthly amount is the same as is provided for Hague grants.As a volunteer myself for the past few years I've been able to allocate maybe 2 hours in an average week to TPF business. Very rarely I've been able to invest significant chunks of time, and it seems the bigger things I've accomplished have come from those periods of exceptional effort (e.g. Forrester Survey @ 40 hours over 2 weeks, Ian Hague donation @ 80 hours over 1 month). This suggests to me that we'll get some really good results out of this plan: TPF has never had on the order of 1000 focussed hours invested into it before, especially for the kinds of things I list in the proposal document.I think this is a unique opportunity: the right combination of TPF having funding plus the mandate to use the funds in this way, TPF having significant needs, and the right candidate to address those needs being available at the right time to be used in this way. The situation has some similarities with what's going on in some other places in the Perl world, like pmichaud being supported to be the Rakudo architect, and Dave Mitchell working on the 5.10.1 release: support is being used to to let exceptional people spend large amounts of time on big, gnarly problems which advance important community projects, while at the same time these people can enable the volunteer communities also working on those projects be more successful and productive. This is a chance for TPF to improve itself by using some of that same good foo.Later this week the TPF Board will make a decision whether to approve this proposal. In order to help them with that they want your input -- so, please post any comments you have here. (No anonymous postings please. Use real names and email addresses; pseudonyms are okay only when they're well known through the Perl community and can be correctly connected to email addresses for any needed follow-up.) I am happy to participate, answer questions, clarify my thoughts, etc. here, in email and also over on #tpf on irc.perl.org if you'd rather chat with me real-time there. Link To Original Source

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