Le blog d'Arhuman

What is the average salary for Perl programmers in 2020?

2020-05-02T05:27:00.001-07:00

Original article published my new blog blog.assad.fr

If I have no definitive answer on this, the Business Insider has some insights:

HackerRank polled 116000 developers about their salaries and got interesting results:

Perl is associated with an average global salary of $84,025.50 (54.2% higher than the global average salary)
Scala is associated with an average global salary of $77,159.60
Go is associated with an average global salary of $72,691.30
Python is associated with an average global salary of $56,670.90
JavaScript is associated with an average global salary of $55,690

Without more information about the polled panel it's hard to state this results as “Truth” but they seems to confirm personal beliefs:

The salary is more linked to the scarsity of resources than to the trendyness of the associated technology.
Perl resources are less and less available.

You know what ? It's good to be a Perl programmer :-)

GoFr - Episode 08

2020-02-22T08:20:00.000-08:00

L'épisode 08 du podcast est en ligne (avec un nouveau format plus court)

https://soundcloud.com/arnaud-assad/gofr-episode-08
https://soundcloud.com/arnaud-assad/gofr-episode-04 On y parle de Machine Learning, d'outils golang et des évènements de la communauté Go.

Perl in 2020

2020-01-22T22:52:00.001-08:00

Original article published my new blog blog.assad.fr

“Nobody use it. It's a dead language. It's a technology of the past…” Are the kind of statement you'll be likely to hear about Perl nowadays.

Nonetheless, I've landed one of the most exciting mission I've ever had because of Perl. I've met great people, because of Perl. I've solved issues in no time, because of Perl.

So, there's no chance I'll drop Perl any time soon.

That doesn't mean I'll stop exploring new languages (like Kotlin) or even loving other ones (like Golang).

But you know, when I love it's forever…

WHAT PERL IN 2020?

For me it will be maintaining and improving an impressive code base used by thousands of people in a great University.

Improving Net::Whois::RIPE, as some people are still using it. (by the way, a new release is out!)

Probably more testing (setting up a CPAN smoker?) and always some more tools…

AND THEN?

It will probably be like that for a long time… I heard decades ago people talking about the death of COBOL but it's still present. (and I'm still proposed missions on this language) I hear more and more people wishing to replace Perl by a new technology like Python (true story!) But you know what, I let them talk.

There's enough Perl code out there to provide me work and challenges for the coming decade.

On the move

2019-09-03T00:26:00.000-07:00

Blogger has been useful, but it's time to get my data back. That's why this blog will slowly move to a self-hosted platform:

blog.assad.fr (for those wondering, it uses Hugo)

See you soon for brand new articles on this support.

Sur le départ...

2019-09-03T00:23:00.004-07:00

La plateforme Blogger m'a bien été utile, mais il est temps de se réapproprier mes données. C'est pourquoi ce blog va tout doucement migrer vers une plateforme auto-hébergée :

blog.assad.fr (pour ceux qui se poseraient la question le nouveau blog tourne sur Hugo)

A bientôt pour de nouveaux articles sur ce support.

GoFr - Episode 07

2019-06-22T13:17:00.001-07:00

GoFr - Episode 07 (Soundcloud) est sorti !
Sébastien FRIESS, Stanislas Michalak et moi y parlons du Framework Buffalo, de la contribution à des projets Open Source et de la GopherCon Eu entre autres choses...

GoFr - Episode 06

2019-05-13T22:50:00.002-07:00

GoFr - Episode 06 (Soundcloud) est sorti !
Sébastien FRIESS, Thomas Perez et moi y parlons entre autre choses de la dotGo 2019 à Paris.

Just enough...macros

2019-04-27T03:00:00.004-07:00

The first article of a series "Just enough Vim to be efficient" talks about Vim macros.

Just enough...Macros (on Medium)

GoFr - Episode 05

2019-02-04T02:17:00.001-08:00

L'épisode 05 du podcast est en ligne (avec encore un nouveau membre dans l'équipe !)

https://soundcloud.com/arnaud-assad/gofr-episode-05
https://soundcloud.com/arnaud-assad/gofr-episode-04 On y parle LoraWan, des femmes dans l'informatique, de nos coups de cœurs, et de l'actualité de la communauté des Gophers.

GoFr - Episode 04

2018-12-05T10:50:00.002-08:00

L'épisode 04 du podcast est en ligne (avec un nouveau membre dans l'équipe !)

https://soundcloud.com/arnaud-assad/gofr-episode-04
https://soundcloud.com/arnaud-assad/gofr-episode-04 On y parle Golab 2018, frenchgo.fr, coups de cœurs, événements et on lance un nouveau concours :-)

Si le podcast vous plait, merci de m'aider à le faire connaitre en plussant/likant sur les sites suivants :
reddit
twitter

GoFr - Episode 03

2018-10-30T01:19:00.001-07:00

GoFr - Episode 03 est en ligne

Dans cette interview, Bastien Vigneron parle du choix du langage Go et de son usage au sein de sa société (LibMed)

Si le podcast vous plait, merci de m'aider à le faire connaitre en plussant/likant sur les sites suivants :

Facebook
Twitter
Linkedin

GoFr - Episode 02

2018-10-10T23:44:00.002-07:00

GoFr - Episode 02 est en ligne !!

Nous évoquons, mon accolyte Thomas Perez et moi :

Les coups de coeur
La communauté des gophers francophones
Les événements
Le nom du gagnant au jeu du cadeau mystère...

Si le podcast vous plait, merci de m'aider à le faire connaitre en plussant/likant sur les sites suivants :

Facebook
Twitter
Linkedin

Podcast sur le langage Go (golang) en Français.

2018-09-20T03:15:00.001-07:00

GoFr - Episode 01 est en ligne !!

C'est le premier podcast sur le langage Go (golang) en Français.

Au programme :

Actualité du langage,
Coups de coeur
Revues de livres
Et un jeu concours avec un cadeau mystère...

Podcast sur le langage Go (golang) ?

2018-08-05T04:44:00.001-07:00

J'envisage la création d'un podcast en Français portant sur le langage Go.

Je serais intéressé par votre retour pour déterminer l'intérêt et le format idéal pour ce podcast.

Pour répondre, c'est via ce formulaire

The fourth virtue of the programmer

2018-07-25T10:09:00.000-07:00

Note: This article was cross-posted on Medium

Larry Wall once wrote “The three great virtue of the programmer are: laziness, impatience, and hubris”. I took great care to follow this path to become a programmer. Though I must admit I already had great disposition for laziness.

Now, as an accomplished programmer (*cough* hubris *cough*), I think it’s time to improve further. I’ve search for a loooooooong time. And after a week of thinking (*cough* impatience *cough*) I’ve decided to talk to you about the fourth virtue of the programmer.

The fourth virtue that’ll make you a more productive programmer is consistency.

Let me show you in this article how to apply consistency for your profit easily (*cough* laziness *cough*).

Find your rhythm and stick to it

Your mileage may vary, but for most people, being consistent in the time you allocate to a project/task will boost your productivity.

Don’t take my word for it, but make an experience:

Code one day a week on a project for one month.
Code 1h a day for one month on another project.

On which one will you be the most productive ?

Even if some tasks are hard to do in one hour, I bet a consistent work will boost your enthusiasm, ease your work and in the end make you more efficient.

Of course you probably work on several project at a time, and external factors might break your chosen rhythm. But as long as you try to be regular in your work you should see improvements.

Find your style and stick to it

Consistency in the way you write your code is a well known quality metric: It improves readability, ease the maintenance/evolution and reduce the probability of bugs.

If choosing the coding style was easy when I was coding in Perl (Larry Wall then Damien Conway paved the way) it can be much difficult depending on your language of choice: The choice is not the same for a JavaScript/PHP programmer or a Python/Go programmer.

But whatever the abundance of choice or not, it doesn’t really matter what style you pick as long as you pick one coding style.

And once you’re picked one, ensure you enforce it in your usual editor.
(It’s just a matter of few lines in my vim config file to have the airbnb style enforced on all my javascript files or gofmt run on my Go file)

Ensure you have consistent goal and consistent results

Use tests!

Let’s say the truth: Testing is our dark little secret, we wish we’d do it more, but in dark repositories that we don’t make public there are stills many places where a test directory is missing.

However we all know that the tests is the minimal architectural work we have to do: How can we achieve our goals if we don’t define them ?

We all know that tests are the required safety net to refactor our code with confidence.

So stop beating about the bush, choose your framework and use it in all of your projects.

Be consistent in your process

We all have some habits/tricks that make us more efficient. As soon as you’ve found one, use it consistently.

For example, I try to drop a LAB_BOOK.txt file in my working directories, to store tips/hints related to the current project: It can be as simple as basic commands to start/stop services, or command line examples of some unusual tools or data/steps to test/improve my code. It might seem useless, but those files prevent me from wasting precious time when I get back to a project after a long halt. Being consistent in the use and the naming of this file is what prevent me from wasting time.

I also try to store whenever possible all the private data (login/pass/ports…) in a separate file named the same way across my repos to have it protected from unwanted disclosure (thanks to specifically modified .gitignore).

We all have coding habits: whatever the way you work with your SCM, name your file, organize your repositories, document your project, try to be consistent; it will save you time and fatigue.

I was not a big fan of generators until lately where I realized how yeoman could be used to enforce most of the above mentioned good practices.

I’m still working on it, but having default layouts for my project is definitely a good way to boost productivity by reducing the initial friction and improving overall quality.

Be consistent in applying what you’ve decided

Once you’ve found a good practice: automate it!

Your tool will never forget, will never be lazy, will never make an hazardous change and will never forgive :)

Your SCM hooks can be handy to autoupdate the Changefile or do some testing.

Common operations on files (conversion, generation) should be scripted.

In fact if you’ve done the same simple task more than 2 times, you probably should script it.

Conclusion

I hope this rant will give you ideas to improve your coding habits. As usual I’d be glad to have your feedback/comment/suggestion on the topic. Don’t hesitate to leave a comment or contact me by mail (arhuman (at) gmail dot com)

Go (Golang) for beginners

2018-02-01T13:58:00.001-08:00

Because I might not be the only newbie in the Go world this year, I've decided to document here all the information I gathered.

Install Go

Go installation is pretty well documented on the official Golang page but it can be summarized to:

Downloading the binary matching your OS and architecture from the golang download page
wget https://redirector.gvt1.com/edgedl/go/go1.9.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Extracting the software (/usr/local/go seems to be the recommended location)
tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.9.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Creating your Workspace
Go workspace is the place where you put your source code and where the go packages/tools will be downloaded.
mkdir $HOME/go
In this directory, create a src subdirectory where you'll place all your code.
mkdir $HOME/go/src

Setting the environment variables
Setting GOPATH (export GOPATH=$HOME/go) to point to your workspace.
Then your path PATH (export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin:$GOPATH/bin)

For a system-wide configuration:
in /etc/profile
For a per user configuration:
in ~/.profile

Editor configuration

If you use vim as I do, you might want to use vim-go or vim-polyglot and read the vim-go tutorial.
But if it's not your case, your solution is probably on the page about the IDEs and editor plugins for Go.

So much more to explore

With this (basic) setup I'm now ready to go further

Setting up Go in docker
Do some datascience
Unleashed goroutines/channels power
...

But that will be in another post :-)

Resources

There are of course many more useful resources to start with.

But I hope the following ones will be as useful to you as they were to me.

Community

Twitter

Documentation

Courses

Podcast

2018 a new year to go

2018-01-09T09:49:00.000-08:00

First let me wish you, dear reader, the very best for 2018:
May you have health, success, fun and love in abundance!

For some years now, I've started learning/using a new computer language every year.
2018 will be no exception: This year I'll learn and use the Go language.

Why Go?

Because I like the (clean and simple) syntax
Because the tooling/ecosystem is mature enough for me
Because of the performance (even if it's not my primary concern)
Because the goroutines / channels look like neat tools to tame concurrency
Because I like the interface concept
Because I subscribe to Eric S. Raymond opinion that Go could be the next C

As usual I'll try to post about my discovery of the Go world.
So stay tuned, and don't hesitate to comment and give advice.

Rewriting my .vimrc from scratch

2017-09-15T01:12:00.001-07:00

"From time to time, I review my tools/processes to keep what’s useful, ditch what is no longer necessary or even convenient, and improve what can be improved. As a developer, I spend a lot of time using the Vim text editor, so in this article I’ll spend some time rewriting my .vimrc."

The full article on Medium.

A better blog for a better you

2017-01-05T13:16:00.000-08:00

To better separate tech posts from non technical ones, I've setup a blog dedicated to productivity/improvement/personal growth.

It's called The 10x path

Stay tuned if you're interested.
Or even better: subscribe to the blog

As usual messages, mails and comments are most welcome.
(to tell me which topics you'd like to see covered for example)

Better than tar

2016-11-08T13:04:00.000-08:00

This time I'd like to show you, why I love JavaScript:

Improving tar with a simple idea and few lines of JavaScript

The code is on github:
jntar (with more info about the original idea of meta-compression)

How to learn JavaScript with confidence

2016-10-11T11:30:00.001-07:00

If you're lost among all the JavaScript frameworks, if you're still hesitating between all the different tools to use, if you're scared by the JavaScript ecosystem complexity, have a look to my post on hello.js :

How to learn JavaScript with confidence

Things might not be as bad as it seems...

Change your Gogs admin password

2016-08-29T00:54:00.000-07:00

I might have missed something, but I haven't found any simple way to change my admin password (with emailing not active) in gogs.

It was quite easy to find the hash location, but as I didn't know how it was generated...

Luckily I eventually found the parameters used, so here it is for you if you need them embedded in a script :

var pbkdf2 = require('pbkdf2-sha256');
var key = 'YourChosenPasword';
var salt = 'AnyRandomValue';

var hash = pbkdf2(key, salt, 10000, 50); console.log(hash.toString('hex'));

All I had to do was then to update the table user, setting passwd to the generated value (and updating salt with the value used in the script).

The devil codes in Pramda - Wandering in the JavaScript Functional programming world

2016-07-06T00:00:00.000-07:00

Article originally published on Hello.js

As a Perl coder, I'm a big fan of functional programming.

If that sounds odd to you, think about all that features that are considered as idiomatic Perl :

List processing (map, grep)
High order functions (Mark Jason Dominus ;-) )
Lazy evaluation (iterators)
Lamda calculus (closure)

Functional programming is a fascinating thing but it’s not so easy to use consistently. We all love the concept, feel the inner power. We all use lists, closure, functions as parameter, but how many of us manage to fully apply functional programming everywhere and commit to pure functions and immutability ?

I recently discovered a wonderful library for functional programming in JavaScript that could help you embrace functional programming even more and I'd like to share it with you: it's called Ramda.

There are several other functional programming libraries (more on that below) but what makes Ramda so practical and somewhat unique is its combination of auto-currying and the design choice to put the data last. These two things empower you and give you endless possibilities through composition.

You probably already know how map and grep can compose to solve many different tasks in a clean way. Now imagine that Ramda offers you one hundred of such functions. The number of combinations, solutions and tasks that you can solve easily just explodes! *1

This might seem theoretical, but for a simple demonstration of how Ramda can ease your life, just read “Why Ramda ?” by Scott Sauyet.

Among the other things that make Ramda so powerful, Iis its ability to mix with promises through ‘pipeP’ and ‘composeP’. Being able to use both functional programing and promises through a clean syntax is priceless to me.

I should also underline the fact that Ramda promotes immutability: it doesn’t mutate input data by default but still allows you to produce modified one through 'assoc'.

As a final note: Don’t be scared by Ramda’s API, it offers probably far more than you want, but everything you need. Follow the easy path: just pick/learn functions one by one.

That being said, it would be unfair to limit functional programing in Javascript to Ramda. If you'd like go further and explore the domain, here are some other projects that I'd suggest to examine:

The well known 'generic' libraries offer functional tools, like the venerable underscore, lodash and it’s speedy brother lazy to name a few.

The reactive programming world also provide functional features with RxJs, Kefir or Bacon for the UI.

And if you want to experiment immutability, the choice is your : You can climb on the shoulders of a giant and use Facebook’s immutable or favour speed with mori or try the frozen object approach of icepick.

In a future article I'd like to talk about my current favourite youtube tech channel : 'funfunfunction' so stay tuned! It's a really great channel about functional programing, JavaScript and other topics of interest.

PS:

Oh, and if you wonder about the title:

I like Ramda so much that I wanted to use it in my daily work, and started to write a port in Perl: Pramda (Perl Ramda). Any resemblance to any film title is purely coincidental...

*1 Functions like ‘transpose’, ‘unfold’, ‘times’, ‘allPass’, ‘cond’ are the first examples that come to my mind, but I bet you’ll learn to love the others while using Ramda.

JavaScript for Perl lovers.

2016-06-03T02:48:00.001-07:00

Article originally published on Hello.js

This time I feel really qualified to write this article because believe me, I love Perl ! I think in Perl, I dream in Perl, and I really appreciate the whole Perl community. I’ve been in love with this language for more than a decade but I decided that I needed a change.

I’ve already said in a previous article why I chose to learn JavaScript this year (instead of getting involved in Perl 6 for example) but let me tell you why you might also enjoy learning JavaScript if you love Perl. Perl developers form a very unified community that all too often, resist outside influences, but learning a second language like JavaScript can really be a very enlightening experience.

It’s expressive

JavaScript, like Perl, is an expressive language. You get your work done with just a few lines of code. When talking about programming languages, I really like the tent analogy:

In a tent, you have functional things (tent fabrics) whose purpose is to provide a function to the user (protect the user) and structural things (tent pegs) whose purpose is only to provide a structure to make the functional things “work”.

The same goes for a programming language, one part of the syntax serves the function and another part of the syntax serves the structure.

Perl and JavaScript and the other expressive languages minimize the structural part, whereas some other languages require more structural code like Ada, Java for example.

It gets the job done

With a gazillion of available modules, you can do everything from highly dynamic Web pages, networking code, command line tools, daemons, desktop to phone applications. JavaScript right now is on a roll, it’s both a front end and a back end language through node.js and with the existent frameworks and libraries it goes as far as robotics. It’s powerful and practical. You can do a lot of things with it, quite easily.

There is more than one way to do it

Let’s state it, I love diversity, I love choice.
Of course, I felt overwhelmed at first when I delved into the JavaScript tools, but that was more the discomfort of learning a whole new ecosystem than a real issue. I’m still a programmer at heart and in mind, I think like a programmer no matter the language that I’m using, it’s only a matter of adapting to syntax and structure.

If I wanted for the “one best way to do it”, I probably would have gone for Python.

You’re at home

Like CPAN? get NPM.
Use closure, functional programming, asynchronous programming, OOP? JavaScript has it all!
You think that blessing is a bit curious but an efficient way to achieve Object Oriented Programming? You’ll love prototypal inheritance.
Want more? What about an open and heterogeneous community, an efficient interpreter, lot of tooling (tests, modules, frameworks)

You don’t blindly follow the pack

Remember all the silly things you’ve heard about Perl?
Imagine, just for one moment, that the same goes for JavaScript:

What if the language isn’t that slow?
What if the language enables you to produce quality software?
What if the quirk of the syntax (callback hell, hoisting etc) can now be managed?
What if the language enables you to code everything and not just Web Page animations?

Why don’t you check by yourself, you might well be surprised.

Vitality

I don’t subscribe to the Perl is dying trend (In fact I think the contrary), I believe in Perl as a powerful and important language in the developing world. I’m not abandoning my Perl roots by learning JavaScript, I’m just growing as a programmer.
But, I must there are advantages here, the JavaScript crowd is bigger, and although that’s by no means a criterion of quality to me, it is an opportunity to meet even more interesting people or discover new paradigms/tools/ideas.

Conclusion

I hope I’ve presented plenty of reasons to at least make you take into consideration that you might love JavaScript as much as you love Perl. In any case, don’t take my word for it, give JavaScript a try.
Next time, I’d like to get into the details and talk about code, if there is some area that you’d like to be covered, don’t hesitate to comment; Your feedback/suggestions are welcome.

Why Javascript in 2016 ?

2016-05-22T13:23:00.001-07:00

Many of my friends express their surprise when I say I chose to learn JavaScript in 2016.

With so many cool languages to learn, why using a "toy language" of the past instead of, let's say Haskell, Go, Nimrod, Rust (just to name some)?

First and foremost, for me it's not as much as learning JavaScript in 2016 as learning a new language in 2016. But whatever your reasons : not become fossilized, improve your efficiency with new tricks/paradigms/tools or just plain fun you'll probably feel the urge to learn a new language sooner or later.
This bring us back to the question why JavaScript in 2016?

Reason to choose JavaScript

Ubiquity

It could be handy to be able to do everything in one unique language (from command line tools, front-end Web dev, server coding, phone applications to robots programming) and JavaScript now allows that. That wasn't the case before but with node/express/commander/ionic/cylon.js (to name few) you'll have all your needs covered.
Data mining, 3D display, efficient network agents, whatever the task, you can do it efficiently in JavaScript.

Marketability

Every study will tell the same story: Javascript developers are on high demand, and the demand is growing.

CodingDojo list Javascript as the 3rd top requested language.
Bloc.io give interesting figures on the growth.
...

This makes JavaScript an excellent skill to possess.

Community

When learning, the community is as much important as the technology studied.
I find in the Javascript community the same things I've learnt to love in the Perl community : efficient tools, diversity, an unorthodox/innovative/open/somewhat messy but pragmatic approach.
This community is easily reachable through the numerous quality blog and sites :

Ecosystem

You could evaluate a language ecosystem by many ways but let's consider the JavaScript ecosystem by it's users base and by its language central repository.

The site modulecounts lists NPM as the first module repository whatever the language (be it for total modules count or average growth) and even if some things are to be improved, npm offer a really easy way to manage/reuse the impressive JavaScript's modules list.

Concerning the users base, a github study on languages (2015) place Javascript as the top language.

That is just numbers of course, but whatever the criterion you choose, chances are that the Javascript's community will score well against all the other languages.

Innovation

Although not as disruptive for your coding habits as another language (like Haskell) could be.
JavaScript brings many things to play with and extend your confort zone.
Want to play with asynchronicity (would be a good Idea if you still haven't done so in 2016 ;-) )? What about trying promises?
Want to try functionnal programming? Check Ramda or Immutable.
Love to explore new Web paradigm? I suppose things like React / Flux or Koa might interest you.
With the language itself being in constant improvement and the use of transpilers, even the syntax evolves regularly.

Tools

That's another area where JavaScript shines. As a developer, having many configurable linters (JSHint, ESLint...), transpilers (Babel), test libraries/frameworks (Jasmine, Mocha, Chai, PhantomJS...), task runners (Grunt, Gulp) enable you to enforce good practices, better code quality/consistency and globally speed up langage learning.

Vitality

For some the abundance of choice and constant change may be daunting.
But if you're not among them, be prepared, with JavaScript, to explore a world where there are always plenty of new options and no consensus on the "best" tools to use.
New tools/projects pop up faster than you can list them and issues tend to be solved in no time.

Conclusion

If you're embracing change, 2016 could be the perfect time to learn JavaScript.
I hope this article gave you enough information to convince you. In all cases, don't hesitate to comment and give your feedback.