You may have heard about a new and larger Perl distribution for Windows called "Strawberry Perl Professional". The idea behind it was known as "Chocolate Perl". You may have heard that name, too. What does that mean for Strawberry Perl for Windows, and for Perl in general?
Don't worry, Strawberry Perl will still be maintained. In fact, Strawberry Perl Professional would not be possible without Strawberry Perl as it has been for the past few years, and is directly installable on top of Strawberry Perl. The ideas behind Strawberry Perl and Strawberry Perl Professional overlap, but are subtly different.
Strawberry Perl is made for the "intermediate-to-expert" Perl programmer (although even newbies can use it), who is likely to be coming over from Unix and is needing to write Perl scripts and modules in the Windows environment. The goal is to be as close to the Perl experience on Unix as possible, and with a minimum of problems, while still staying native to Windows.
The goals of the modules that Strawberry Perl includes, therefore, are:
Strawberry Perl Professional is made for the Perl programmer of any (or even no) experience writing Perl in or for the Windows environment, and includes in addition:
To this end, Strawberry Perl Professional includes Padre as an IDE, and also includes a graphical CPANPLUS shell and Plain Old Documentation viewer. It also includes most of the modules in Task::Kensho, and more links to websites for the Perl community, especially relating to the installed modules, and introductions to programming Perl.
If you want to test out the first alpha version of Strawberry Perl Professional, read the announcement (so you know what you're getting into) and then go to the Strawberry Perl beta page and download and install it. Suggestions for improvements, and bug fixes to the component modules, are certainly welcome - I've already been given quite a few.
Curtis Jewell has been helping build and write Strawberry Perl for Windows for the past year, and also reports bugs and sends patches to other Perl projects.
]]>From the Terminal window, paste this in at the prompt:
perl -le'for (@ARGV){m{/(\w+?)\.SpeechVoice};' \
-e'$_=$1;s/([a-z])([A-Z])/$1 $2/g;' \
-e'print qq{say -v "$_" This is $_};}' \
/System/Library/Speech/Voices/* | sh -x
On my Mac, "Organ" isn't found, but I don't know why.
]]>In the past few days, I've spiffed up the site (with design help from Jeana Clark) and added pages on Perl and PHP. I need more examples, though. It's 2010, and there's no reason anyone shouldn't know about parameterized SQL calls.
The site source is hosted on github, so if you have any contributions, please fork it and let me know about your applied changes, or you can email me directly.
Thanks!
P.S. In the next few days, I hope to fire up some redesign on perl101.org, too.
]]>Highlights include:
Already I have found that my regular expression compilation is taking 6% of the runtime in my sample runs in ack. I had no idea.
Just amazing. Go try it now, and buy Tim Bunce and the other contributors a beer.
]]>It's the time of year for Advent Calendars and it looks like the Perl community isn't disappointing this year.
The first day talks about using Package::Alias to alias Mouse to Moose.
Ricardo Signes' calendar to showcase things he has been working on. His first entry is about Sub::Exporter which looks very powerful.
This one starts off with setting up Rakudo, so it requires very little prior knowledge.
Tips for system administrators
All of these have RSS feeds, so they'll be easy to follow. Have fun!
Matt Follett is a developer in the Informatics team at The Genome Center at Washington University School of Medicine, where he works on high-throughput DNA sequencing projects. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri at Rolla, where he majored in Computer Science & Computer Engineering. He has worked for Monsanto, Boeing, and Beck Automation as a software engineer. He was the head of the 2009 St. Louis BarCamp. He currently resides in St. Louis, where he heads the local chapter of Perl Mongers.
]]>Back when I first started learning Perl 5, I was excited to find the Perl Advent Calendar. It was a series of 24 or so short articles about useful Perl modules or techniques, with one new entry each day leading up to Christmas. A few years later, the Catalyst crew started the Catalyst Advent Calendar. I always liked the Perl Advent Calendars, and kept meaning to contribute. Every time, though there were too many things I'd want to write about -- and mostly they were my own code, so I felt sort of smarmy and self-promoting and never did it.
Finally, though, I'm glad to say I have tackled those feelings. I will not shy away from showing off my own code, and I will not worry about having to choose just one thing. This year, I will publish the RJBS Advent Calendar, 24+ full days of cool, useful, or stupid code that I have written and given as a gift to the rest of the CPAN community.
I've had a lot of fun working on this project, and it's helped me find and fix a number of little bugs or imperfections in the software I'll be talking about.
The first door opens in seven days. I hope it's as fun to read as it was to write. No returns will be accepted. Approximate actual cash value: $0.02
Ricardo Signes has written tons of modules on the CPAN, including Dist::Zilla, the heir apparent to Module::Starter. He is also a total sweetheart, and has a fuzzy head.
]]>Go look. Enjoy the non-ugly color scheme. Marvel at the code syntax highlighting and ability to embed images. Navigate posts using thoughtful categories.
A million thanks to Dave and Aaron for putting this together, and to Six Apart for the design. Links to feeds will be going up here on Perlbuzz as soon as I have time.
]]>To match the massive advances in Perl over the last few years, www.perl.org has been brought into the modern era. www.perl.org has been completely redesigned, making it clearer and easier to use. All the content has been reviewed and brought up-to-date to provide links and other helpful resources for both new and experienced Perl programmers.
Thanks to www.foxtons.co.uk for donating time from Leo Lapworth, Stephen Morgan, and Cameron Richmond!
Holy cow is it pretty. Thanks to those who made it happen! The download page is especially handy.
]]>
open( my $fh, '<', 'something.txt' );
while ( my $line = <$fh> ) {
# do something with the input
}
If that open fails the program continues on. The call to
readline will fail, return undef as if we're at
the end of the file, and the user will be none the wiser. If you
have use warnings on, you'll get a "readline() on closed
filehandle", but that's not much help when you should be dying.
Instead, you should be opening your file like this:
my $filename = 'something.txt'; open( my $fh, '<', $filename ) or die "Can't open $filename: $!";
This way, your user gets a useful error message if something goes
wrong, but more importantly, the program doesn't continue as if
nothing is wrong, potentially doing what it should not.
Unfortunately, I see programs where otherwise-sensible programmers
ignore the return code of GetOptions.
use Getopt::Long;
GetOptions(
'n=i' => \my $count,
);
# Do something that uses $count
print "Processing complete!\n";
There are any number of ways the user can call this program incorrectly:
$ perl foo -n Option n requires an argument Processing complete! $ perl foo -n=five Value "five" invalid for option n (number expected) Processing complete! $ perl foo -m=12 Unknown option: m Processing complete!
In all three of these cases, the user made a mistake, but the program
lets it slide without a mention. The user's going to be disappointed
with the results.
The solution is simple: Always check the results of GetOptions().
The easiest way is to task && exit(1) after the call:
use Getopt::Long;
GetOptions(
'n=i' => \my $count,
) or exit(1);
It's simple, effective, and prevents unexpected sorrow.
]]>