Recently in Rakudo Category

I'm pretty tired of the sniping and punditry about the recent release of Rakudo Star. However, David Golden has put together a great article about what the Rakudo Star release means both to the team and to the public.

Key points from his article:

• Rakudo Star is the first prototype of an end-user distribution tarball
• There is no way reactions to Rakudo Star can possibly live up to the hopes and dreams of those involved the project (and I say that it can't live up to the expectations of those outside the project, either)
• Rakudo Star still is a significant step forward for Perl 6
• If anyone was waiting for Perl 6 to rescue Perl, then they'll need to keep waiting.

And then, down in the comments, Moritz Lenz points out something I'd overlooked:

Yes, people now say "Rakudo is slow as $funny_metaphor", but that's much better than "Rakudo is vapourware". Once we speed up Rakudo, we can simply post benchmarks and say "look, it's now $n times faster than before". "Rakudo is slow" implies "Rakudo is", and that's a big step forward.

Thanks for the reminder, Moritz. Next it will be "Rakudo is faster, but not fast enough." And then maybe "Rakudo doesn't have enough documentation," and then "Rakudo doesn't have all the modules it should." All of it is progress.

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

• Running tests in MySQL with Perl via MyTAP (justatheory.com)
• chromatic rebuts the FUD of startup times for Rakudo Star (modernperlbooks.com)
• Top 10 tricks of Perl one-liners (blog.ksplice.com)
• A checklist for writing maintainable Perl (modernperlbooks.com)
• A gentle introduction to Perl 6 with Rakudo Star (blogs.perl.org)
• Opening Perl modules with vim (blogs.perl.org)
• Your Perl test suite is broken (blogs.perl.org)
• Diving into Perl 6 (perlbuzz.com)
• What's up with Proud To Use Perl (http://proudtouseperl.com/) Are people no longer proud?
• Why are Perl web apps less popular than those in PHP? (blogs.perl.org)
• Perl 5 and Perl 6 are different languages, and that's a good thing (use.perl.org)
• Perl 6 is easier to read than write (blogs.perl.org)
• The official Perl 6 cheat sheet (svn.pugscode.org)
• Currying with Perl 6 (perlgeek.de)
• Try Rakudo and learn Perl 6 in your browser: (try.rakudo.org)
• Perl 6 has data dumping baked right in (perlbuzz.com)
• What to respond to "Perl 6 isn't Perl any more" (perlbuzz.com)
• How to write about Perl 6 (blogs.perl.org)
• When should I use database abstraction? (blogs.perl.org)
• Videos from YAPC::NA (presentingperl.org)
• What I learned at YAPC::EU 2010 (blogs.perl.org)
• Where to now in Rakudo Perl 6 development? How to speed up Rakudo? (perlgeek.de)
• Colorized code snippets on an ANSI terminal (blogs.perl.org)

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

• NYTProf 4.04 now warns if it sees $`, $\& or $\', which are regex performance killers (blog.timbunce.org)
• Facebook::Graph automates Facebook interactions (blogs.perl.org)
• Iterating your way to happiness with Perl 6 (use.perl.org)
• Perlcast returns with an interview with Stevan Little about Moose (perlcast.com)
• CPAN on your iPhone (blogs.perl.org)
• YAPC::NA 2011 will be in Asheville, NC (news.perlfoundation.org)
• Ten years of Perl 6 and all the goodness it's brought (use.perl.org)
• Fixing my #1 bash annoyance (perlbuzz.com)
• Wedge more text in your tweets with Unicode abuse (blogs.perl.org)
• Ingy's take on Rakduo Perl 6: It's really ready (blogs.perl.org)
• Convert Perl POD to ePub format for your iPhone (blogs.perl.org)
• I would love to see something like this for the Perl standard modules (ruby-doc.org)
• Six cool Perl 6 built-ins (use.perl.org)
• Outsider recap of Larry's 2010 State of the Onion (pcworld.com)
• Template Toolkit + vim users, the tt2.vim and tt2html.vim files are now part of vim-perl (github.com)
• All about Perl 5.12's deprecation warnings (effectiveperlprogramming.com)
• Github is now at one million projects (techcrunch.com)
• Common Perl 6 idioms (perlgeek.de)
• The Moose Blog (blog.moose.perl.org)
• Modern Perl vs. Desperate Perl (bofh.org.uk)
• Per-computer colored prompts in bash (geofft.mit.edu)
• Someone perceives Perl as old, dying. You can either A) Argue, or B) Do awesomeness with Perl to prove him wrong. I suggest B.
• Why roles in Perl are awesome (perlbuzz.com)

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.