What's Up With Perl 6

This Interview with Larry Wall has a nice look at the State of the Onion on what’s up with Perl 6, in development for 15 years, and due to be released at the end of this year. Do I believe it? Maybe. Is perl still a relevant language? That’s for you to decide.

Perl 5 and Beyond

Randal L. Schwartz linked on Google+ today to a post on the future of perl5. The post and slides has a lot of information, so it's a good read.

Impatient Perl (free eBook)

It's 151 pages, and the HTML link is currently broken, but if you're interested in learning perl (as you all should be), check out Impatient Perl, a free eBook by Greg London.

Why Perl 6 is Different

Leon Timmermans has a nice look at Why Perl 6 is different.

Perl 6, like Perl 5, Ruby and Python steals a lot from other languages. As you may expect, it steals too many things to mention from Perl 5. It steals chained comparisons from Python, objects from Smalltalk (in particular Squeak's traits should be mentioned). It thankfully steals nothing from PHP.

Not to split hairs of course, but Perl 6 still isn't out, so it can be the most awesome thing since sliced bread, but if no one uses it....

Perl 5 Development Resumes 5.12 Released

Via @curtismchale comes news that Perl 5 development has resumed, and that 5.12 is released. Here's the annoucement details of 5.12 with a few notible (but minor) changes, such as being able to survive the Y2k38 barrier and warning on deprecated features by default.

Reddit Clones In Various Languages

OK, this is just awesome. Check out a few Reddit.com clones written in a variety of languages. Also note the comment to code ratio in the Perl example! ;)

Perl Myths

Cool slideshow about Perl Myths such as "perl is dead" and whatnot.

JAPH Examples

Cultured Perl: The elegance of JAPH - nice look back at some of the great JAPHs of ages of old.

Perl 5.10 Released

Wow, Perl 5.10 has been released! What is new for perl 5.10.0? I think my favorite feature so far is the '//' operator. Will save lots of typing...

20 Great Perl Modules

Chris Ball has a presentation online which highlights some great perl modules.

Mod_Perl Book Online Cool, Foz pointed to a free online book, Practical mod_perl.

Tiny P2P App in Python Cool, check out TinyP2P, a "... functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language."

99 Bottles of Perl on the Wall Found a link to a 1998 perl "shortest way to produce '99 bottles of beer on the wall'" challenge, and discovered why Damian is my hero. Check out the full thread here.

MIMEDefang Random Linkages today go to MIMEDefang.

MIMEDefang is a program for inspecting and modifying e-mail messages as they pass through your mail relay. MIMEDefang is written in Perl, and its filter actions are expressed in Perl, so it's highly flexible.

Beginning Perl Available for Download The book Beginning Perl is available for download in PDF format. Cool stuff! Thanks to use.perl for the link.

Perl Poetry Perl Poetix has some quite interesting abuses of the Perl language to form poetry.

Perl Quiz of the Week Perl Quiz of the Week

Every Wednesday I send out Perl quizzes: Usually requests to write a program or function to perform a certain task. The 'regular' quiz can be solved using only techniques and functions found in Learning Perl (3rd edition) by Schwartz and Phoenix. The 'expert' quiz may be difficult.

Perl? Style?!?!?! Speaking of perl and breaking of it, I ran across a good node on perlmonks all about Perl Styles for Large Projects.

Personally I learned a lot from Effective Perl Programming (Hall and Schwartz) and The Damian's Object Oriented Perl books. While it's cool to write nifty one liners like those found in the famous japh file, I know from personal experience that you have to adopt a much more "readable" style of coding if you intend to ever look at the code again.

Which you will by the way, whether you think so now or not :)

Perl-fu Stuff like this make me realize how far I have to go as a perl programmer. "Wow"

The Door Server The Door Server, another useless use for a cuecat and perl. Via the post on perlmonks.

Oh my Probably the best perl obfuscation I've seen ever is The Answer over at perlmonks.

Perl 6 Slides From the Damian comes slides entitled Perl 6: Right here, right now. Cool stuff, via use.perl.org;

Extreme Programming Links and Info Thanks to Asim on the SPUG list there's a bunch of good info and links on extreme programming and perl. Read more for it... Here are the links on Extreme Programming that I promised at the last meeting:

BOOKS
"Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change" by Kent Beck. Overview of XP philosophy. Short readable chatty. "Test Driven Development" by Kent Beck. Available online at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/testdrivendevelopment/files/TDD17Jul2002.pdf. More development focused. Includes lots of code samples, ideas for testing techniques. Again very readable, mostly due to the chatty humorous style.

WEBSITES
http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki The Wiki. Publicly editable web site. Contains living discussion on different ideas including XP. If you have questions about specific parts of XP - e.g. does pairing work over the internet - this is the place to go.

http://www.xprogramming.com/software.htm Download unit testing frameworks for different languages here.

http://seattlexp.com Seattle XP Group. Information about monthly meetings and weekly pair sessions at Tully's on 45th in Wallingford. Pairing sessions are on every Thursday (except the second) and are from 6.30 pm to 9.30 pm. Bring your laptop with a project or come ready to pair with someone else.

MAILING-LISTS
Send a blank e-mail message to these addresses to subscribe. To read archives go to http://yahoogroups.com and search for the lists by name.

extremeperl-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Focus on Perl and Extreme Programming. Low volume.

extremeprogramming-subscribe@yahoogroups.com General XP discussion. High volume.

extremeprogramming-seattle-subscribe@yahoogroups.com More focused on Seattle area announcements and events. Low volume.

refactoring-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Focus on refactoring. Medium volume.

testdrivendevelopment-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Focus on unit testing and test driven development. Medium volume.

SPUG on SPAM I missed it this month, but the notes from the Seattle Perl User Group's talk about Spam filtering with Mail::Audit and Mail::Spamassassin are available online in openoffice/staroffice format. Update - here's a office 9x version for those who are too lame to use OpenOffice :)

New search.cpan.org For all the camel heads out there, it looks like the search engine at CPAN is out of beta. The new search engine is all shiny and new, and written completely in python! (Ok, everything is true except for the last bit :)

mod_perl Technology Comparision Yohimbe sent me over a cool link with charts and graphs comparing the abilities and limitations (as far as requests / sec and memory usage) that different mod_perl type technologies have. They include embperl, php, html::mason, and a whack of others.

The Damian Spake... Headed down to seattle last night to the Seattle Perl Users Group meeting to see a talk by The Damian. Damian Conway is well known for his many cool ass perl modules, as well as his book Object Oriented Perl. The talk was not on perl so much as other things, which (as the talk was a warm up for the YAPC) I'm not at liberty to reveal. However, The Damian was a fantastic speaker, as well as a damn interesting one. He is a better teacher than my high school physics teachers as well. If you get a chance to go to YAPC, or see Damian speak anywhere, I heartily suggest you do so. If you're in the pacific northwest and have the opportunity to head down to Seattle for the SPUG meetings, head down there, it's worth the drive!

Spiraling Perl It's been a while since I wandered over to PerlMonks, but I did this monrning, and in their Obfuscated Code section I found a fantastic program that outputs it's own code in a continuously spiraling.... erhmm... spirale. It's very cool, well worth the cut and paste to watch.

Perl - Apocalypse 5 The perl weenies in the crowd are sure to already know that Apocalypse 5 from Larry Wall is out, so you can ignore this.