use Perl

This post is the closing bracket to that post.

For one month, I posted every seventh or eighth entry on use.perl, on average. It was a lot of work, but it was fun. It helped November forward quite a bit, too. (No, I won't write "November the wiki" when there's no risk of confusion. ☺) After doing that, I took a few days' vacation. Now I'm back to blogging, but at a less hectic pace; maybe semi-weekly or so.

I have a Perl 6 trick that I want to write about, but that'll have to wait until tomorrow. Today I'll just write this month summary: what historical event I wrote about on each day, what I did that day, and what I did overall compared to what I said I'd do in the beginning.

Every day, I surfed to Wikipedia to find some historical event that happened on that day, and which captured my interest. Here are the themes that apparently interest me:

1. 10-megaton hydrogen bombs
2. computer viruses
3. shooting dogs into space
4. pharaonic tombs
5. blowing up government buildings
6. radio signaling
7. taking over government buildings
8. electromagnetic radiation
9. big falling walls
10. lost&found explorers
11. the end of a world war
12. exploding whales
13. giant storms
14. taking off with planes from ships
15. failed peacekeeping attempts
16. young female Polish kings
17. moonwalking robotic dogs
18. animated cartoons
19. being stripped of one's Grammy
20. space stations
21. pulling the plug on lakes
22. famous classical works
23. censorship
24. evolution
25. dynamite
26. hijacking TV stations
27. machine gun shootouts with the FBI
28. Shakespeare getting married
29. recording technology
30. soccer

(I can't help noticing how Western this list of events is. This is the first time that a Wikipedia bias has really struck me — I think I'm going to partly counteract this by finding a few tens of notable non-Western events and adding them to the "events on this date" lists on Wikipedia.)

Here's what I did on the same days, in terms of November, Rakudo or Perl 6 improvements.

1. implemented .end in Rakudo
2. combatted Rakudo regressions
3. created (part of) a skin
4. helped chromatic++ fix a Parrot build failure
5. brought November up to speed with Rakudo
6. added .fmt to S29
7. implemented .fmt in Rakudo
8. created tests in the mediawiki-markup branch
9. [nothing, too busy]
10. [nothing, too tired]
11. started implementing MediaWiki markup
12. worked around Rakudo bugs
13. worked around (and explained) more Rakudo bugs
14. explained November data model
15. applied simple patch
16. hacked on the MediaWiki parser
17. hacked on the MediaWiki parser
18. almost finished first skin
19. [nothing much, ranted about aesthetics instead]
20. hacked on the MediaWiki parser
21. wrote about November branches
22. [nothing, raved about languages]
23. [nothing, status update]
24. finished first skin!
25. made November's make test use prove
26. debugging, cleaning up
27. debugging, cleaning up
28. hacked on the MediaWiki parser
29. wrote a test module for de-cluttering
30. hacked on the MediaWiki parser

Finally, here are the things I promised I'd do, annotated with comments on what I've done:

• Create three nice-looking layouts, which can all be used in p6w.

  I created one really nice-looking layout for p5w, but I still haven't ported it to p6w. mpeters++ contributed a second layout.

   

• Read a synopsis.

  I've re-read and enjoyed S02, S04, and S09. Haven't blogged about it, though.

   

• Give S29 some much-needed love.

  Only started doing this, by writing about .fmt — plan to do a lot more.

   

• Add or curate tests from the Perl test suite.

  I've hardly touched the Perl 6 test suite. moritz++ for doing it a lot, though.

   

• Implement a feature in Rakudo.

  Not as many as I'd like, but a few.

   

• Triage Rakudo tickets in the Perl RT system.

  I've mostly just been creating them. ☺

   

• Implement MD5 digesting in Perl 6.

  This remains a problem slightly above my programming ability. I've written the algorithm, but it doesn't produce the results it's supposed to. I'm stuck.

   

• Add features to p6w that p5w already has. (article history, diffs)

  Nope. Still a good idea, though. I'm surprised I didn't mention MediaWiki parsing among the features I was planning to implement, because that part of November is the real winner from the efforts of my one-month spree.

   

• Blog about the architecture of November.

  To some degree, yes. Can be done to a greater degree in the future.

   

• Blog about cool things in Perl 6 and Rakudo.

  Actually, I've only been blogging about bugs in Rakudo... but I hope I am able to communicate, through most of my posts, my feeling that Perl 6 is awesome. If not, I probably wouldn't keep doing what I'm doing.

   

• Add POD documentation to PIR subs and methods in Rakudo.

  No. Still a great idea, though. The exact implementation of things may change, but good documentation is valuable.

   

Looking over those results, I'm both a bit proud over the things I did do, and eager to improve on the things I didn't. I guess that's the way it should be.