Recently in Rakudo Category

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)

Every year at OSCON I come home with a head full of ideas, and better yet, a huge list of new things to work on. Since the book is now done, and OSCON is now over, there's a chance I could work on them.

• Ack plug-ins
  • I've been wanting to have plug-ins for ack for at least a year now, and I've connected with a number of people like Randy J. Ray who are on board to help me out. First task: Move it on over to github.
• Coverity scans for Parrot
  • Met with David Maxwell of Coverity and he fired up the Coverity bot for Parrot, and now I have new niggling bugs to pick at.
• PR work for first big release of Rakudo
  • There will be the first major release of Rakudo in spring 2010, and I got some plans going with Patrick Michaud to figure how we were going to build up buzz for that. I also have the notes from Damian's Perl 6 talk which are a fantastic summary of Perl 6's cool new features.
• Human Creativity
  • Julian Cash has been having Jos Boumans do all his Perl work for the Human Creativity project, but I offered up my services to do whatever he wants. Turns out the Julian is also working with Devin Crain, who I've known for years in an entirely non-geeek context.
• Hiring horror stories
  • Got some great response to my talk on job interviewing, and as always the stories resound the most. I talked to a few people afterwards who said they'd give me some horror stories I can run on The Working Geek as instructive examples of how not to do things, and why they're so awful.

For those of you leaving OSCON, what tasks did you just assign yourself in the past week?

• Formatting dates with strftime() http://tinyurl.com/c8fwaf
• What is Moose and why is it the future? http://use.perl.org/~acme/journal/38554
• No surprise: Perl books down. Surprise: Ruby down even more. http://tinyurl.com/d9fhfn
• Rakudo Perl #14 ("Vienna") released -- see http://tinyurl.com/c3842v
• Perl 6 stretches its wings, makes a milestone release http://tinyurl.com/dgm5oc
• The 10th Anniversary YAPC website is now live http://yapc10.org/
• chromatic praises the unsung heroes of Perl http://tinyurl.com/b3t926
• Perl project WebGUI is #1 rated in vitality on Freshmeat http://tinyurl.com/arokuj
• Parrot documentation available as a CHM file: http://tinyurl.com/dn5vbf
• Red flags in programs http://tinyurl.com/bajnjg
• Applying to Google Summer Of Code 2009 with The Perl Foundation http://tinyurl.com/bfngyw
• Converting MJD's reverse Polish calculator to Perl 6 http://blog.afoolishmanifesto.com/archives/341
• Randal Schwartz puts the smackdown on SD Times' FUD http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33306
• From baby Perl to grown-up Perl http://tinyurl.com/dzvmsz
• MJD's RPN calculator, Take 2: http://tinyurl.com/d7bm67

Rakudo Perl, the implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot virtual machine, has made a milestone release.

For years now, Rakudo has been tucked into the Parrot project, but no longer. Rakudo is now its own project, with its own source repository and its own release schedule, following the Parrot release schedule closely.

This 14th development release of Rakudo is codenamed Vienna, after Vienna.pm, the Perl Mongers group that has been sponsoring Jonathan Worthington's development work since April 2008. Future releases will be named after other Perl-related cities.

This is a fantastic time to take a look at Rakudo and see what's happening. We're reaching the top of the hill, and I couldn't be more excited.

As promised, I'm going to start posting the quickie news tweets that I post to the Perlbuzz twitter feed here in the main Perlbuzz blog. These are links I found interesting and newsworthy, but didn't have any commentary or other story to go with them.

Here are the last twenty.

• Rakudo: More bugs squished, over 7000 passing spectests http://tinyurl.com/afutw8
• Peteris Krumins' presents Perl one-liners, part 1 http://tinyurl.com/bu72vb
• RT @rakudoperl Rakudo Perl now passing 7,007 spectests.
• Tim Bunce's screencast of a talk on Devel::NYTProf http://tinyurl.com/auchnx
• Nested data structures are slow, but this slow? http://tinyurl.com/chklac
• Launching YAPC|10 http://tinyurl.com/bpfmlu
• colomon posts his first useful Perl 6 script http://tinyurl.com/ago334
• RT @rjbs Ludicrous registrar suspends perl.org DNS: http://tinyurl.com/dhaafr
• My first Rakudo bug http://tinyurl.com/d2eo6h
• A tree map of the CPAN http://tinyurl.com/dxledf
• Updated periodic table of Perl 6 operators http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/periodic/
• Mac OS X security update may break your Perl http://tinyurl.com/bvreqv
• Perl's new wave http://tinyurl.com/cwssau
• Love for Devel::NYTProf http://tinyurl.com/by535j
• Moose already has a book http://tinyurl.com/aw725k
• Class::Sniff's killer feature http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/38483
• WebGUI 7.6 released http://tinyurl.com/ajxxg7
• Backwards compatibility is tech debt: http://tinyurl.com/bdwajv
• Calculating the Dow Jones Industrial Average w/Perl http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/38427
• Web in Perl needs work http://tinyurl.com/ajcc5q

I just gave my keynote at Frozen Perl, and one of the big points I made was that we don't know what Perl 6 is going to look like. It's totally a green field. There's no toolchain, no LWP, no DBI, etc.

My big question: Should Perl 6 use the CPAN?

Does an 11 year-old distribution system make sense in 2009? In 1998, when we didn't have everything living in a cloud, and hosting websites took a lot of money, and if you wanted massive bandwidth, you were at a big company or a university. In 2009, those are no longer true.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that we don't distributing thousands of excellently awesome modules to the world. If we didn't, we wouldn't be Perl. But does it need to be through a centralized distribution channel like PAUSE + CPAN?

I don't have an answer.

Discuss.

This makes me so happy. Eric Wilhelm writes in this use.perl posting

Our December Meeting was a rakudo workshop, where we realized that rakudo had no implementation of warn(). While the implementation that got checked-in by the end of the meeting is not fully compliant with the spec's requirement that warn() throws a certain sort of resumable exception, it does now at least exist, and prints your message on stderr.

While I love any given gathering of Perl Mongers, whether to have a technical talk or just to drink beer, I've always thought that it would be great to have PM groups use their collected talents to add directly to the Perl community. My long-dormant Phalanx project was an attempt to take advantage of that.

Now, PDX.pm has made a concrete contribution to the #1 need of the Perl community today: Getting a Perl 6 implementation out the door.

Bravo to PDX.pm!

Simon Cozens just posted to the Perl 6 internals list:

I just ran this code, which worked with the expected results:

use DBDI;
my $conn = DBDI::DriverManager.getConnection(
    "dbdi:SQLite3:test.db", "", "");
my $stm = $conn.createStatement();
my $rs = $stm.executeUpdate("CREATE TABLE foo (bar, baz)");
my $stm = $conn.prepareStatement(
   "INSERT INTO foo (bar, baz) VALUES (?, ?)");
$stm.setColumn(1, 123);
$stm.setColumn(2, "Thingy");
$stm.executeUpdate();

Merry Christmas, Simon

I love the smell of progress in the morning.

The Perl Foundation has announced a Hague Grant for Jerry Gay to implement the Rakudo Perl command line interface.

The work will be to define the S19 synopsis pertaining to command-line interaction with Perl 6, and to provide a Rakudo implementation of the synopsis.

Jerry will need to document the Perl 6 command line syntax, implement its tests, create a command line parsing library for Parrot, and implement a subset of the Perl 6 command line syntax.

I couldn't be happier with this direction. I made some vain stabs at command line interaction on Rakudo long ago, but not much came of it. Having a command line interface will make it much easier for users to work with Rakudo as it progresses. Perl without being able to do filtering magic isn't very Perly, no?

Patrick Michaud also received a Hague Grant, to work on the Perl Compiler Toolkit and regexes and other internal hoohah. I'm sure it's useful, but this feeble-minded reporter's head hurt when trying to follow the details of the grant.