I have a lot of modules on CPAN. There are way too many for me to give them all the attention they deserve, so often patches get dropped and bugs ignored.
In particular, there are a few that could use the attention of someone interested in helping maintain them. Log::Dispatch is used by a lot of people, and could definitely use some attention. There are a number of open bugs in RT, and I have more patches & bugs in my email inbox.
Another distro that could use some love is my ORM Alzabo. I don't think it has a lot of users, but if you are a user of it and want to see it better maintained, let me know.
If there is some other distro of mine that you'd like to help maintain, especially one with open bugs, please let me know.
Write to autarch@urth.org and tell me what you'd like to help with. If I don't know you, I'll probably ask you to start by submitting a patch. All of my code is in my svn repo, so getting the latest version is easy (https://svn.urth.org/svn/Distro-Name/trunk).
Dave Rolsky has written a ton of modules. He's also vegan, tall and super cool.
]]>It's a gathering of tech enthusiasts from the Wisconsin area, Milwaukee, Madison, Appleton, even Chicago. There will be sessions on web-related stuff, non-profits, co-working, and plenty of other topics. Plus, you get a free t-shirt, and we feed you! But you must participate, as there are no spectators at BarCamp. There's a good mix of presentations, discussions, working sessions and late night hacking, as well as media making, photos and video. In prior years we've had remote-control go-karts, videoblogging, gadgets, RSS and elevator hacking.
There's a video from last year's BarCamp. I hope to see you all there.
]]>when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.
So much to think about. So much explained on a few short sentences.
It also meshes beautifully with Habit 1.
I'm going to be rolling that around in my head for a while.
]]>As the "the glue/duct tape/chainsaw that holds the web together", Perl is all but invisible to most web users. It is still one of the best-established languages of choice, yet remains behind the scenes and out of the limelight. This "brand invisibility," coupled with the factors outlined below, has contributed to the erroneous perception that Perl is outdated or unfashionable in the glaring light of other more energetically-promoted solutions. Despite the continuing dominance of LAMP, what do most web designers think the "P" stands for? Not Perl.
Cultural perception and perceived popularity don't help anyone to make a logical evaluation; this is an attempt to put the record straight.
Many Perl monks (and other alpha-geek programmers) hold design in some kind of contempt. Here are some comments by Perl coders:
This kind of wilful separation from design is a big put-off factor to newbie web programmers, and is endemic throughout the Perl community: "designers can't come in here until they're willing to learn serious code". In other words: "the aspirant must show humility". Understandable perhaps; and, once you start trying, the community is as helpful and friendly as can be. Just not overly welcoming to "designers"; in fact, some Perl websites appear almost deliberately or even proudly ugly. Perl templating solutions like HTML::Template or Template Toolkit get ignored by most web designers in favour of comfy, close-to-hand solutions like PHP, ASP.NET, whatever Dreamweaver offers, or younger and prettier models like Ruby on Rails or Python's Django.
Here's a more rational approach to the "design vs. code" separation:
"...the best Perl programmers are rarely the best HTML designers, and the best HTML designers are rarely the best Perl programmers. It is for this reason that the separation of these two elements is arguably the most beneficial design decision you can make when devising an application architecture." -- Jesse Erlbaum, Using CGI::Application
This remains true, except that increasing numbers of people and teams are becoming good enough at coding and design to handle both passably well, They're choosing to invest the time necessary to learn both, as the Ruby on Rails explosion demonstrated. The Perl community needs to respond with a makeover and, maybe, some key "we're cool" websites like Catalyst's website to help rescue Perl's dated image, even if many Perl programmers don't care about it.
Most designers want to be included in the "our site is cool, therefore we're cool crowd," not shoved in next to an ancient HTML website in ANSI colours.
Programmers know that effective templating separates logic from content from style. However, designers familiar with web pages and visual appeal are often used to working with actual files, unlike programmers who can hold everything in their heads, and in lines of code that don't look at all like what they're going to produce.
Instead of these cosy actual files (the static web pages), most templating means that a site's links call a script that generates the pages. In other words, your website becomes a web application program, with all the power and flexibility. The literal, clunky file-for-every-page website disappears in the process, and this is just where many designers get a bit lost in starting the journey.
Both the original DHTML and current Ajax are effectively still attempts to turn web pages into dynamic web applications. What isn't obvious to the designer is that these technologies have been around for ages. They don't see that secure and reliable interaction with the server, solid yet flexible programming in Perl can drive a zippy Web 2.0 site as easily as Ruby on Rails.
Designers who want to start programming sometimes fail to make the conceptual leap from web pages as static files, to web applications consisting of components and screens. Failing to make this leap means they fall instead between logic and content by defaulting to PHP, Dreamweaver templates, Cold Fusion, etc. Perhaps this failure to make the complete leap happens because designers feel uncomfortable without seeing the actual "pages" they're working with, or because the dominant web design software makes it easy to adopt its own default solutions.
Where are the "Perl tools" for Dreamweaver? All the publiclity and books read "Dreamweaver CS3 with ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP." If Eric Meyer can improve CSS support in Dreamweaver, could the Perl community do the same towards integrating Perl tools? A million design houses across the world might then at least see a menu item containing the word "Perl" in their favourite software.
Perl itself can be no harder to learn or read than the PHP to which many designers default. Learning Perl is far from dead, now in its 5th edition, and is regarded as one of the best books for anyone learning programming in general.
However, Perl programmers often delight in the potential economy of the language, and their concise code can appear obscure and impenetrable. I've even heard good programmers, fluent in other languages, say "Perl is horrible" or "unreadable". Yet to a beginner, Java (to take one example) is far more "horrible", verbose and complicated -- just compare "hello world" in both languages.
Actually, beyond that initial step, how easy code is to understand depends on who does the coding. Precisely because there's more than one way to do it, Perl can be written as readably as any other language. Most times this isn't obvious to a beginner because Perl coders don't need to keep it obvious when they can use powerful shortcuts or write one-liners. With this in mind, my Perl monk friend replied to a draft of this article with a "line noise" of caution:
I wouldn't recommend it as a first language. It's a second or third language. That's when it becomes powerful. I wouldn't want to put people off programming by making them look at @s=map{s/_/!/gi}grep{!~/^#/}@p.
This isn't true with FastCGI FastCGI or mod_perl. But try telling a designer who may only just be discovering the unforgiving nature of the command-line that these are an easy install. Or persuading a popular shared hosting provider (where many designers are hosting) to supply them on their list of default options.
To complicate the issue, there's also a groundswell of opinion against the complexity of frameworks in general, with sites prototyped in Rails being redeveloped with other tools. Then there's the shared hosting debate.
Isn't there a gap opening up here for tried-and-tested but nicely packaged Perl solutions for web development? Can't we fit between a designer's static pages and a full-blown framework? But just try finding a good-looking Perl templating tutorial that shows off the kind of tidy, well-crafted and semantic XHTML and cutting-edge CSS that the best designers produce, or a one-click Perl template install with a good-looking promotional website.
Rails has demonstrated that speed isn't initially the issue. Ease, buzz, style and ubiquitous market presence are. Perl doesn't have to remain the dowdy elder sister -- given the same kind of push, it can go to the ball too.
If you want to develop your skills, ask "will I be using a programming language at least 2-3 times a week to actually do something; that is, as much as you currently use (X)HTML/CSS?" If not, you'll almost certainly forget what programming you learn and might be better off leaving it to "real programmers".
However, if you do want to develop those skills, a good route is to experiment with a templating system that encourages the separation of logic and presentation, like HTML::Template or Template Toolkit. Work through the tutorial websites and just get something working. All you need to know for starters is that HTML::Template fills HTML templates dynamically with data according to the logic in your Perl, or that Template Toolkit generates static pages from your Perl.
You do run Apache locally on your machine, don't you? Okay. Now get CPAN and use it to install Perl modules for your platform. Be mindful of case-folding if you're on Mac OS X Yes, I know there should be a guide to all this, but like all learning curves in big territories, there's no authoritative manual. To make it easier, perhaps there could be.
To make an intelligent comparison, you might want to try Ruby on Rails. The latest OS X already has RoR bundled. If you've done all this and are still committed to PHP, keep the logic apart from the design or tears of despair will follow. Steer clear of the convolutions that PHP allows, and note the following well:
PHP has full support for classes, attributes and methods, and supports object-orientation, but the key problem is that no one seems to use it! There is a vast body of sample PHP code on the web, but nearly all of it is absolutely dreadful. HUGE long procedures, no structure, little code refactoring, and intermixed code and HTML that is impossible to read and must be impossible to maintain.
-- Tim Roberts, Python Wiki
Anyone who has been there will echo "yes, it is impossible to maintain," but that's not the language's fault. It might not all be squeaky-clean, but there isn't a vast body of "absolutely dreadful" Perl on the web. As a designer looking to settle on a language, that's a very valuable pointer. If you've ever had to plough through lines of "impossible to read" and "impossible to maintain" PHP, you'll understand that although PHP can be written as well as any other language, it often isn't.
If ways can't be found to improve the overall quality of PHP authorship, well-styled bridges just need to be built for designers serious about programming to visit the Perl community. When they get there, they'll need to feel at home.
Dave Everitt is a print-turned-web designer/developer who internalised HTML and CSS in the last century and steadily developing Perl skills in this one. His work includes the roles of web designer, educator and new media academic.
]]>I just paid my first renewal for perlbuzz.com. It took about three weeks from when I first registered the domain name one night while brainstorming with Skud about a new newsy sort of site. The first news story: Further reports from YAPC::Europe.
Now, Skud is off doing other things, most recently her wiki at geekfeminism.org. Perlbuzz's output has slowed some as I try to finish up my book "Job Hunting For Geeks" (not that that's the title we'll use) for Pragmatic Bookshelf.
What hasn't changed at all is my appreciation for every one of you who reads Perlbuzz, or subscribes to the RSS feeds. Keep reading, and I'll keep writing.
xoxo,
Andy
I'm happy to announce that the Google App Engine team has given me permission to talk about a 20% project inside Google to to add Perl support to App Engine. To be clear: I'm not a member of the App Engine team and the App Engine team is not promising to add Perl support. They're just saying that I (along with other Perl hackers here at Google) are now allowed to work on this 20% project of ours out in the open where other Perl hackers can help us out, should you be so inclined.
The architectural changes to make this happen are not insignificant. Check out Brad's post to find out how you can help.
]]>]]>
Now, Mr. DBI, Tim Bunce, has done some amazing work and released Devel::NYTProf 2.0. Follow the link and check out the screenshots.
As cool as everything looks, and as helpful as the color-coding is, the big advance in 2.0 is the clickability:
On lines that define a subroutine NYTProf now adds ‘comments’ giving the total number of times the sub was called, the inclusive time spent in that sub, and the average. Then it adds a break-down of the same details for every location that called the subroutine.
For anyone concerned with finding bottlenecks in Perl code, Devel::NYTProf is clearly the gold standard.
]]>So I started the YAPC::NA 2008 page on the Perl 5 Wiki, and I ask that y'all go post links to your YAPC::NA blog posts there. I've added a few links to get you going.
]]>If you've posted pictures from YAPC::NA 2008 somewhere, please mention it here in the comments.
]]>It's unfortunate that Andi Gutmans of PHP has to wave the "I'm full of crap" banner with...
PHP has been around a long time, and some advocates of newer languages say it's past its prime. PHP adherents disagree. Perl is complex and hard to maintain, Gutmans says. "Perl has pretty much disappeared when it comes to the Web."
... although it's interesting that it's PHP, not Perl, getting accused of being "past its prime." I also can't imagine much of anything harder to maintain than PHP slapped together by thousands of non-programmers. Of course, Josh counters with:
But McAdams defended Perl's vitality, citing examples of major users. "I would ask him what Ticketmaster and Amazon use for their back ends," McAdams says. "[Perl] has a very large user base in Web apps but also has a strong presence in the financial industry."
A fine article, Josh, and I thank you for taking on this important role in TPF.
]]>"The meetings were good, and I got to see a lot of my friends. There was Pete, of course, and Josh and Heather from Chicago, and there was Yaakov from —"
"Dad, are you fooling? Is that his name?"
"Yes, that's his name. Yaakov. Different people have different sounding names. He's very nice. And I saw Schwern..."
"That kind of sounds funny too!"
"That's his name, Michael Schwern, and he is pretty funny. We watched bad movies. And Jim came from New York and another Jim came from New York. He just had triplets."
"I remember that!"
"And there were people from all over the world. I had pizza last night with Adam from Australia, and José was from Portugal and I saw Karen from Ireland, and I saw Abigail and he came from the Netherlands in Europe."
"He's a man named Abigail? Why is he named Abigail?"
"Because that's his name. And I also saw my friend Barbie who is a man from England."
(This proves too much) "A man named BARBIE!?!?" (laughing, thinking of her own Barbie dolls.)
"Yup. And I saw my friend Allison and I found out she just moved to Africa. And there were a lot of people from all over the world that came to be in those three days of computer meetings. They seemed to like it. And I am very very glad to see all these people every year, but I did miss you, too, Shmoo, and I'm glad to be home."
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