Perlbuzz

What editor/IDE do you use for Perl development?

2009-10-21T22:33:28Z

Gabor Szabo is running a survey about Perl development:

I have set up a simple five-second poll to find out what editor(s) or IDE(s) people use for Perl development. I'd appreciate very much if you clicked on the link and answered the question. You can mark up to 3 answers.

Please also forward this mail in the company you are working and to people in your previous company so we can get a large and diverse set of responses.

The poll will be closed within a week or after we reached 1000 voters. Whichever comes first.

Perlbuzz news roundup for 2009-10-21

2009-10-21T16:11:59Z

These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com.

How the Portland PostgreSQL users group had a Patch-a-Thon (pugs.postgresql.org)
Padre 0.47 integrates better with Windows (ahmadzawawi.blogspot.com)
Tim Bunce's Perl Myths talk, updated for 2009 (slideshare.net)
Free Perl book excerpts from O'Reilly (oreilly.com)
Building your career in open source (itworld.com)
Getting the Perl Mongers into shape (szabgab.com)
François Perrad's talk on the Parrot VM now online (slideshare.net)
If you're not checking the return code of Getopt::Long::GetOptions(), you have impending sorrow.
mod_perlite runs Movable Type (majordojo.com)
Giving remarkable help online (community.livejournal.com)
Help David Wheeler name methods in DBIx::Connector (justatheory.com)
DBD::SQLite now has foreign key support (use.perl.org)
Great move: The Perl Foundation creates a marketing committee (news.perlfoundation.org)
Topics to consider for Perl 6 newbies (anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com)
Perl 5.11.1 released (use.perl.org)

Perlbuzz news roundup for 2009-09-24

2009-09-24T18:09:10Z

These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com.

Perl described in five sentences (blog.timbunce.org)
RT @chromatic_x perl 6 is some 6% faster today. You're welcome.
"Perl is full of odd, and they like it like that." (twitter.com)
Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software (itworld.com)
Book review of The Definitive Guide to Catalyst (dave.org.uk)
YAPC::NA 2009 survey results available (use.perl.org)
RT chromatic_x Rakudo Perl 6 passes 26% more spectests (and the test suite has grown by 19%) since the August 2009 release.
Learn Github (learn.github.com)
Submitted with eye-rolling: The $case_insensitive flag on PHP define() (us.php.net)
Porting a non-Moose object to Moose (kentcowgill.org)
Seven signs your interface came from a programmer (voyce.com)
Curtis "Ovid" Poe added to Board of Directors of the Perl Foundation (news.perlfoundation.org)
How not to restart mod-perl servers (openswartz.com)

Perlbuzz news roundup for 2009-09-09

2009-09-09T14:21:40Z

These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com.

Perl projects for newbies (szabgab.com)
On Moose and speed (blog.afoolishmanifesto.com)
perldoc.perl.org updated with Perl 5.10.1 docs (use.perl.org)
From user to contributor (use.perl.org)
Hash JavaScript with Template::Toolkit for improved caching (blog.greenfelt.net)
Dave Rolsky teaching a one-day Moose class (blog.urth.org)
Why I love Perl already (thejoysofcomputing.wordpress.com)
Is your Perl community visible? (blog.timbunce.org)
Don't optimize for yourself in communities (perlbuzz.com)
Releasing Your Company's Software as Open Source (itworld.com)
What is the Right Way to do OO in Perl 5? (chris.prather.org)
How to write apps in Rakudo http://groups.google.com/group/de.comp.lang.perl.misc/browse_thread/thread/abbf6e06c0b3b253# (Oh yeah, it's in German)
What's new in Perl 5.10.1 (perltraining.com.au)
More changes in the Perl Foundation (news.perlfoundation.org)

Mentoring in open source communities: What works? What doesn't?

2009-09-09T01:54:09Z

By Esther Schindler

Open source offers amazing opportunities. There are almost no barriers to entry. If you want to try creating a new-to-you kind of application, or to learn how to write bright-shiny documentation, or to use the latest technology that your Day Job doesn't give you access to -- you can just barrel right in with an open source project and get involved. Once you become proficient (or demonstrate that you already are), you can apply those skills in the next phase of your career. Even better, you can choose which community you want to be a part of, and find a comfortable culture where your contributions matter.

However, because open source is so personally driven and self-motivated, there aren't always a lot of opportunities to consciously improve your skills -- except on your own. While that's certainly valuable, it relies on you recognizing what needs improvement and then knowing what to do about it. In a regular office, you might be lucky enough to work with someone who'll take you under her wing, and give you specific advice about how to improve your code. Or someone senior to you will let you talk his ear off about the hard choices you have to make, and suggest solutions you didn't think of. The distinction I'm making here is between "learn on your own" (such as examining the changes others make to the code you contributed) and somebody offering specific, individual advice (e.g. "It might run faster if you did THIS..."), particularly in an ongoing personal relationship.

Many open source communities do actual mentoring (even if they don't think of it with that label); others don't. Some make a concerted effort to connect newbies with more experienced people. They provide opportunities for people to work together in smaller teams (not just a gang hanging out in an IRC channel, however useful that is), such as in sprints and code-a-thons. (Tops on the list of "encourage mentorship" is, of course, the Google Summer of Code. But I know there are other less-public endeavors.)

For a feature article at ITWorld.com, I want to interview people from several open source communities about the mentoring experiences. I want to hear what they do right, and how they go about encouraging mentoring relationships. I'd also like to hear from open source participants who have yearned for a bit more one-on-one attention... and what (if anything) they've done about it.

My goal here is to explore what's involved in a successful mentoring effort, and also find out what doesn't work. I like to think that this can help all sorts of open source communities that want to attract more participants.

How you can help

Think you can help? Please email your thoughts on the topic to esther@bitranch.com. Here are some of the questions you could address:

What have been your mentoring experiences in open source communities? How well or how poorly have they worked? Why do you have that opinion?
If you developed mentoring relationships in an open source community, how did they come about? Was there a deliberate effort to connect people (how did that work?) or did it evolve on its own (how did it happen?)?
What did you learn? What did you hope to learn?
Knowing what you do now, what would you do differently?
What advice would you give to open source communities in regard to mentoring?
I'm also particularly interested in hearing from people in communities where mentoring doesn't exist or where it doesn't come as naturally -- opportunities may exist, but they're harder to find.

Be sure to identify:

the project(s) you're involved in. Include the URL for the project if you like, as well as how you contribute (I write code, or I've led locally-run code-a-thons, etc.)
your name, role/title, and company in the way you prefer me to refer to you ("Esther Schindler, a programmer at the Groovy Corporation, and also a frequent contributor to the Blahblah open source project").

I'll accept input on this topic until Monday, September 14th. After that I have to write the article. :-)

A long-time technology evangelist and community instigator, Esther Schindler has been in the computer press since 1992. Her primary journalistic focus for the last decade has been software development and open source, and she's contributed as writer or editor to Software Test & Performance, InformIT.com, DevSource.com, and dozens of other publications. She's currently on assignment for ITWorld.com -- where she writes the open source blog Great Wide Open

ack 1.90 released

2009-09-08T04:46:32Z

I just released ack version 1.90 to CPAN. If you don't know about ack, it's a text searching tool for programmers aimed specifically at searching large trees of code. Find out more at betterthangrep.com.

Here's the changelog for this version:

1.90        Mon Sep  7 23:24:24 CDT 2009
[ENHANCEMENTS]
Added Ada support.  Thanks to Shaun Patterson.

Added -r, -R and --recurse options as in grep.  They have no
effect because directory recursion is on by default.  Also added
--no-recurse for orthoganality. Thanks to Mark Stosberg and
Ryan Niebur.

Version in --version is prettier.  Thanks, Ori Avtalion.

Added an updated ack.bash_completion.sh from Adam James.

[FIXES]
Expanded --files-without-match to --files-without-matches.

Removed all the hi-bit characters, so we don't have any encoding
problems.  It's all entities now.

Fixed capture-stderr to localize some globals that were obscuring
errors.  Thanks very much to Christopher Madsen.

Fixed uninitialized errors in tickets #138 and #159.

[DOCUMENTATION]
Fixed an incorrect command line in the docs for -f.

Added notes on --pager.  Thanks to Mike Morearty.

[BUILD]
Made the squash program more robust when handling POD.  Thanks
to Kent Fredric.


1.89_02     Wed May 13 16:20:21 CDT 2009
[DISTRIBUTION]
Updated Makefile.PL to use new ExtUtils::MakeMaker features.
Thanks, Schwern.

[FEATURES]
--version now shows the version of Perl that ack is running
under, and the full path to the Perl executable.

Added new switches --color-match and --color-filename, which
let you define ACK_COLOR_MATCH and ACK_COLOR_FILENAME from the
command line.

Added new switch --column to display the column of the first
hit on the row.  Thanks to Eric Van Dewoestine.

Added .ss to --scheme.

[FIXES]
No longer die if you have a .tar.gz file in your tree.

More tweaks to get the detection of input and output pipes
working.

Fixed an amazingly bad call to cmp_ok() in t/ack-passthru.t.

[DOCUMENTATION]
Started an ack FAQ.

Don't optimize for yourself in communities

2009-09-04T16:08:59Z

It drives me nuts every time I connect to an IRC channel, Perl-related or not, and the first thing I'm greeted with is "Don't ask to ask, just ask!" (Over in #perl on freenode, the greeting is "No pasting, at all". BAD USER!)

The problem that the keepers of the channel are trying to solve is when new users come in and ask "I have a problem with arrays, can someone help me?" The regulars of the channel would prefer it if the person seeking help would simply ask the question: "How can I delete an element from the middle of the array." So they put up that chastisement, "Don't ask to ask!"

How incredibly short-sighted!

First, is it really a problem that people ask an introductory "Can someone help me?" Wait, don't answer yet. Don't say "Well, they can just say..." That's not what I asked. Is it a problem? No? Then don't try to fix it.

Second, why not have a more welcoming message to those who you're ostensibly looking to help, and who you'd like to have as part of the community? Why scold people before they've even said anything? How about "Thanks for joining us in #vim! We're glad to answer questions as best we can!" instead?

Third, stop optimizing for your own convenience. Try to consider what your messages are saying to those around you. You just might find the communities you're in to be a nicer place.

People's behaviors are not code that can be optimized by careful code tuning. You can't eke out every last second of efficiency in human interactions.

Addendum: I wrote the welcome for #perl-help on freenode. It says "Welcome to #perl-help. We're glad to help with your questions, but you may need to wait a bit for a response. Posting your code will likely help, please see here: http://paste.scsys.co.uk/" It tells the same things, about how to post your code, and encouraging users to ask questions.

Perlbuzz news roundup for 2009-09-02

2009-09-02T14:23:29Z

These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com.

Perl 5.10.1 is out, but no announcement yet (search.cpan.org)
Learning Perl and Mastering Perl ebooks available for $9.99 (use.perl.org)
If only we had something like this in Perl: (rubyinside.com)
Attaching a debugger to mod_perl session: (use.perl.org)
CPAN licensing guideliness (perlfoundation.org)
The problem with Perl prototypes (modernperlbooks.com)
XML Tools For Perl presentation that just saved me a lot of heartache (slideshare.net)
Megaprops to Michel Rodriguez for XML/XPath awesomenss! (search.cpan.org)
Call for proposals for a CPAN META Spec (dagolden.com)
Four things open source projects should know about dealing with the press (itworld.com)
If open source contributors could be directed, I'd have them wash my car and do my laundry (reddit.com)
This guy thinks a feminine Perl 6 logo is bad. (reddit.com)
Perl 6 development does not detract from Perl 5 (perlbuzz.com)
The joy of contribution (use.perl.org)
Try::Tiny, yet another try { } catch { } module. (blog.woobling.org)
Hinrik is starting to work on the vim-perl color coding tests (blog.nix.is)
Test HTML and XML with XPath (justatheory.com)

Perl 6 development does not detract from Perl 5

2009-08-31T05:25:52Z

A recent thread on use.perl.org brought up one of the worst myths of Perl 6: That Perl 6 is harming Perl 5.

Andrés N. Kievsky commented in a thread on use.perl.org

drop this insane perl 6 thing immediately. Give us good, stablethreading in perl 5 instead of self-hosting grammars in perl 6.

Later he said:

proper OO syntax, multithreading, better speed ... are major issues in perl 5 that should have priority over perl 6 work. You can't expect me to believe that the perl 6 team can't work on that.

There's so much misunderstanding here about how open source works, I'm going to ignore the ways that Perl 5 has benefited from the process of creating Perl 6.

The problem with Kievsky's assessment is that it assumes that:

contributors are finite
contributors are interchangeable
contributors can be directed.

All three are wrong.

First, there is a vast, unbounded talent pool. The set of people available to work on Perl 6 is not limited to those who would otherwise be working on Perl 5. It's not as if there's a box of people that cannot grow or be added to. There are many contributors who have joined the Perl 6 project without having ever worked on Perl 5. In this instance, Perl 6 has actually brought people into Perl under the Perl 6 banner.

Second, not everyone can work on the same parts of different projects. The tasks on Perl 6 may well be very different than the Perl 5 improvements that Kievsky would like to see. I have been contributing to Perl 5 for years, but I'm not at all available to help on the Perl 5 tasks he wants, because they're not in my area of expertise. However, I can help a lot with Perl 6 tasks, and not just programming. Parrot and Perl 6 are a better fit for me.

Finally, and most disturbing, Kievsky seems to think that by wanting something badly enough, people will work on those tasks. Unfortunately for this idea, there is no one directing Perl 5 development tasks, and nor can there be. Open source contributors are volunteers. They work on what they want to work on. Even if I was clamoring for those Perl 5 improvements, I'd rather keep a great programmer working in the Perl community working on Perl 6 rather than leaving Perl entirely because there was no work she felt like doing.

The only way to get a feature added to Perl 5, or any open source project, is to write it yourself, or to encourage others to work with you on it. It's the way of open source.

Perl 6 and Perl 5 development work are not mutually exclusive. Work will continue on Perl 5 long after Perl 6 has hit prime time.

How to poop on your project's contributors

2009-08-28T03:08:27Z

GCC 4.3.4 was released recently. Here's the announcement:

GCC 4.3.4 is a bug-fix release containing fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 4.3.3. This release is available from the FTP servers listed at: http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

...

As always, a vast number of people contributed to this GCC release -- far too many to thank individually!

"Too many to thank individually?" How many is "too many"? Would the list of GCC contributors have caused multi-megabyte email messages to swamp the mail servers across the Internet?

What this message really says is "I do not want to take the time to thank people individually. Your contributions are not worth a few minutes of my time." What a fantastic way to poop on your contributors. They would have been better off just not mentioning the contributors at all, rather than saying "You're not worth enumerating."

When someone contributes to your project, the least you can do, quite literally, is to include his or her name in a list of credits. Here are the acknowledgements from WWW::Mechanize.

Thanks to the numerous people who have helped out on WWW::Mechanize in one way or another, including Kirrily Robert for the original WWW::Automate, Gisle Aas, Jeremy Ary, Hilary Holz, Rafael Kitover, Norbert Buchmuller, Dave Page, David Sainty, H.Merijn Brand, Matt Lawrence, Michael Schwern, Adriano Ferreira, Miyagawa, Peteris Krumins, Rafael Kitover, David Steinbrunner, Kevin Falcone, Mike O'Regan, Mark Stosberg, Uri Guttman, Peter Scott, Phillipe Bruhat, Ian Langworth, John Beppu, Gavin Estey, Jim Brandt, Ask Bjoern Hansen, Greg Davies, Ed Silva, Mark-Jason Dominus, Autrijus Tang, Mark Fowler, Stuart Children, Max Maischein, Meng Wong, Prakash Kailasa, Abigail, Jan Pazdziora, Dominique Quatravaux, Scott Lanning, Rob Casey, Leland Johnson, Joshua Gatcomb, Julien Beasley, Abe Timmerman, Peter Stevens, Pete Krawczyk, Tad McClellan, and the late great Iain Truskett.

That's everyone who has contributed such that I was able to get their name (e.g. not an anonymous bug in RT).

And whenever I update a change log, which I release as part of release announcements, I put the person's name in there, too, as in this from ack:

Added new switch --column to display the column of the first hit on the row. Thanks to Eric Van Dewoestine.

One of my favorite Miss Manners letters went like this:

Dear Miss Manners, when is a thank you note not required?

Gentle Reader, when no gift is received.

All project coordinators would do well to remember the lesson.

Addendum: Pete Krawczyk took me task this morning, rightly, for not mentioning that GCC does have a huge contributor list, and they do publish it: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Contributors.html. My frustration is not in the lack of collection of names, but in the face slap of "There are too many of you too mention." If you get 100 wedding presents, you don't say "That's too many thank you notes to write, so I'm just going to handwave them." I optimize my projects for making sure that everyone's contribution is mentioned at the very least in the Changelog so that people can see their contributions acknowledged in a visible time at the time of release.

Perl coming to Android phones

2009-08-24T05:15:03Z

By François Charette

Android is an operating system for mobile phones that runs a modified Linux kernel and the Java environment. The Android Scripting Environment (ASE) allows you to edit and execute scripts directly on the Android device. Until now only Python, Lua and BeanShell were supported, but a request was filed to add Perl as well. Recently, support for Perl was added to the development tree, and today that feature request was closed, and is part of OSE 0.11 alpha.

This means we can expect that Perl will be officially supported on Android with the next stable release of the ASE. It will then be possible to write neat Perl programs on an Android phone, like this "hello world" example.

François Charette is an independent scholar in the humanities with a passion for Perl. He is the initiator and co-developer of Biber, a BibTeX replacement written in Perl.

Perlbuzz news roundup for 2009-08-19

2009-08-19T17:07:38Z

These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com.

2009 WebGUI Users Conference Sep 10-11 (plainblack.com)
perl101.org's source is now at http://github.com/petdance/perl101/tree/master I welcome contributions.
The PAUSE security updates re: Perlmonks security breach are complete. Thanks Adam+Andreas. (use.perl.org)
How to boost your career by contributing to open source projects (theworkinggeek.com)
Help perl101.org become a great tool for Perl newcomers (perlbuzz.com)
Help Tim Bunce update his Perl Myths talk (blog.timbunce.org)
What a tangled web Kwalitee culting has accidentally woven (use.perl.org)
On today's episode of Dreadful APIs of Doom, PHP's print_r() function: (us.php.net)
Jacinta Richardson: A Perl-only conference, and the most awesome community (use.perl.org)
perldoc.perl.org source code on github (use.perl.org)
Yuval Kogman: Delimited Continuations for Perl (blog.woobling.org)
Alias: We must promote the First Time Experience before we promote Six (use.perl.org)
Community contributions for those who don't feel rockstarry enough yet (perlbuzz.com)
Typography and perception of Perl (blog.newint.org)
This is why you use Perl's \b zero-width assertion when replacing words. (selinker.livejournal.com)
Why company-based PAUSE accounts are a bad idea. (use.perl.org)

Community contributions for those who don't feel rockstarry enough yet

2009-08-16T01:49:02Z

Mark Stosberg kicks ass. Note only is he a driving force in CGI::Application, he's also working on some scutwork in CGI.pm. He got privileges to the CGI.pm bug queue and has closed 100 of the 150 bugs in the queue. (He's also done this for me with the WWW::Mechanize queue, too)

Note that I didn't say he fixed 100 tickets, but that he closed 100 tickets. As he notes:

Many had already been addressed by Lincoln some time ago. Those were simply closed. Still, I found about 20 fairly ready-to-go patches, and those have now been processed and released today as CGI.pm 3.45. Whenever code changes were made, I also strived to make sure new automated tests were added that covered those cases. You may be surprised how many methods in CGI.pm have no automated tests for them at all.

Although Mark Stosberg is a fine programmer in his own right, what he's been doing here requires no special skills, no megabrain rockstar code chops. He's doing project management and cleanup. It's so simple, even you can do it.

Yes, I'm talking to you out there, thinking "I've always wanted to get into open source projects," whether it's to improve your career or just to help out. There are always ways you can pitch in that don't involve writing new code. I hope you'll find some and join us.

Help perl101.org become a great tool for Perl newcomers

2009-08-13T17:48:28Z

A few years ago I started perl101.org. My tag line was "What every Perl programmer should know," and the site would cover a wide range of basic topics.

The goal is not to cover the topics in depth, but give just enough of a taste to give the reader an idea of how to do something, and enough to go off of to investigate further. It's an FAQ of sorts, but of techniques.

The idea came from having the same questions asked over and over again in IRC.

How do I remove elements from the middle of an array?
How do write something to fetch web pages?
How do I write a regex that doesn't match something?

I also want to show examples of the Right Way to do things, like using chomp instead of s/\n$//. I wanted to tell people about tools like perldoc that I know many programmers don't even know exist.

Here's where you come in

I haven't done much with perl101 for a while, but I'd like to get it going again, fully awesome. I've put the code on github and I'm asking for contributions. Please pull a fork, add content to it, and let me know when your fork is ready to merge back to the master and I can republish. I'm specifically not making it a wiki, because I want to maintain editorial control to help keep it focused.

The site is also pretty ugly, and if you have better ideas for getting the content out there in an attractive way, I'd love to hear it.

There's also a perl101-talk mailing list and I welcome your participation there as well.

Let's put our collective heads together to help out newcomers to Perl!

Super-sized Perlbuzz news roundup 2009-08-11

2009-08-12T02:46:48Z

These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com.

Perl whipupitude to the rescue to notify Perlmonks users of security breach (dagolden.com)
Skud debunks myths and answers questions about her OSCON keynote on women in open source (infotrope.net)
Bail on Perl because of Perlmonks fiasco? Sounds silly to me (staynalive.com)
Milestones in the Perl Renaissance (modernperlbooks.com)
Help end licensing under "same terms as Perl itself" (perlbuzz.com)
The awesome Peteris Krumins strikes again: Famous Perl one-liners explained, part II: (catonmat.net)
Strawberry Perl releases its biggest update yet (csjewell.dreamwidth.org)
Perl does error messages right (use.perl.org)
Dave Rolsky: How I use Catalyst (blog.urth.org)
Carl Masak: 3D graphing with Perl 6 (use.perl.org)
PPI now supports Perl 5.10 (use.perl.org)
Dear TPF - don't send money, send thank you letters (perlalchemy.blogspot.com)
Perl::Metrics2 scalable enough to parse the GreyPAN (use.perl.org)
First impressions of Padre (use.perl.org)
The YAPC::EU Perl marketing BOF (use.perl.org)
Rakudo project manager Patrick Michaud: Building a "useful release of Perl 6" (use.perl.org)
Stumbling with Rakudo (lastofthecarelessmen.blogspot.com)
RT @perloneliner perl -MTest::Valgrind -e 'leaky()'
Help test the first release candidate for Perl 5.10.1 (use.perl.org)
Brad Choate and I just moved Text::Textile over to github (github.com)
Please comment on these seven grant proposals (use.perl.org)
BooK on his White Camel award (use.perl.org)
Rocco Caputo tries out git (use.perl.org)
Why I stick with Perl (mechanicalrevolution.com)
Data structures made easy with Data::AsObject (use.perl.org)
Perl 6 has not missed the boat (perlbuzz.com)