ybiC's Friends' Journals

Flore Louise Apolline Bruhat-Souche

BooK — 2010-08-20T22:17:07+00:00

On Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 9:30, Flore Louise Apolline Bruhat-Souche was born. She weighs 3.02 kg and measures 48 cm.

Word already spread through IRC (#perlfr and #yapc mostly) and via email and telephone.

The mother is fine, the father is slightly tired and the big sister is happy.

There is one photo online.

On tour: Open Source Bridge, YAPC::NA and other fun things

jarich — 2010-07-21T01:30:30+00:00

After the fun I had at OSCON last year, it was no effort at all for pjf to convince me to spend June and July in the USA this year, conferencing.

Portland, Oregon

I arrived at midnight on the 31st May and was met at the airport by Schwern, pjf and Nadia, who took me onwards to donuts and pies. Having traveled for something like 30 hours at the time I was rather wiped out and probably not as appreciative of this as I should have been, but I soon got to bed and slept very soundly.

Schwern warned me ahead of time that he was going to be a busy, and thus less friendly host, and that he and his housemate Nick had been a little guested-out due to an almost endless procession of house-guests. He must have exaggerated. Between them, Schwern and Nick took us to the local farmers' market, to a parade, to numerous dinners and drinks out, and more. Schwern helped us get to the conference location, and also accompanied me home most nights.

Open Source Bridge

The conference was Open Source Bridge; and it is unlike any community-run conference I've ever attended. It was extremely professionally run, with copious amounts of information, high quality keynotes and speakers, an excellent feedback system... big and little things that the conferences I've been involved with are still struggling with after 6+ years and this was only OSB's second year! My talk was very well received, I was spoiled for choice for every single session and the unconference at the end really just capped things off. It was good to see so many familiar faces, and I caught up with some Australians, and Australian-expats that I hadn't seen for quite some time.

If you get to choose the geek conference you go to next year; make it Open Source Bridge!

More Portland, Oregon

The following two weeks, Sherri and Christie kindly hosted Paul and I. When I ran into some personal issues, I could not have hoped for more generous hosts. Sherri made sure I got out of bed each day, and many days Schwern and others made sure I got out of the house. Apparently we were lovely guests, but really Sherri and Christie were excellent hosts. Sherri cooked copious amounts of extremely yummy vegan food, and let me eat it for breakfast and lunch. They took us strawberry picking, to a great Ethiopian restaurant, and took me to an amazing vegan cafe for breakfast on my last day in Portland.

YAPC::NA, Columbus, Ohio

Next up was YAPC::NA in Columbus, Ohio. Very much like YAPC::EU I felt completely at home in this crowd. It was great to know that I could walk into any conference talk and have a pretty good idea of the topic matter. It did feel a little strange that many of the big names, and the people I view as particularly important knew me, but many of the regular people neither recognised me nor my "handle", but I suspect I shouldn't have been so surprised.

My tutorial was very well received, I met a whole lot more people, learned a bunch of new things, and got all fired up about finishing writing our Enterprise Perl course and documenting perl5i. It was really, really awesome to catch up with Karen, Jesse and Piers again, specifically.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Milwaukee wasn't originally on my list of places to visit, however a friend online invited me to drop by and visit, and I had a few days free, so why not? My friend, Jordi, and Sarah, invited me to stay with them. Jordi is an astrophysicist who spent some of the first afternoon explaining to me how it is that neutrinos do in fact mutate. Which was actually much more interesting than I think he thought I'd find it.

We walked the riverfront, found great restaurants, saw the music festival from afar, went to a nearby Strawberry festival (yum!) and spent time playing with the newly arrived arduino set. I've been wishing I could get involved with arduino for years, but also never been into electronics. Jordi and I worked through the basic tutorials with his board, and I found the whole thing very cool!

To top the trip off, Jordi and Sarah invited me to hang out for drinks with some of their colleagues one evening (they all work at the nearby university). I had a thoroughly good time, and felt I fitted in just fine, even though most of them use Python. :) After drinks there was dinner (with 3 free drinks for the ladies) and then Tron. Ah, good times.

New York City

My next scheduled stop was the big apple. While at YAPC::NA I discovered that a fellow Melbourne Perl Monger (Patrick) had recently moved to New York, and he insisted that we should stay with him. I had some minor adventures getting to his place, but received a very warm welcome, and was glad to take a cold shower. That was the first summer-like weather I'd seen for my whole trip thus far.

While in New York, I explored the New York Public Library (and saw the Rose Room), had a tour of Google with lunch (thank you to Tom Limoncelli), caught the Staten Island ferry, saw the Statue of Liberty, walked down Wall Street (and saw the cordoned-off outside of the New York Stock Exchange), checked out the Empire State building, the Sex Museum, Times Square and the Rockerfella(?) building. Much touristy stuff.

Patrick and Helen were lovely hosts, and it wasn't their fault at all that the temperature refused to drop to something reasonable for the whole time I was in town. ;)

Minneapolis, Minnesota

My last touring destination was Minneapolis where Steven Levine arranged an amazing weekend of activities to keep me busy. I did my best, but arrived with the start of a sore throat and fever. I arrived on a Thursday afternoon and first up was dinner with Matt and Deb followed by a scotch tasting. Even though I'm not a scotch drinker, I wished I was well enough to participate, but having already had some paracetamol, I dared not. It seemed like a lot of fun though.

On Friday, Steven took me out to a favourite breakfast location (which we did every day, actually), and then later to a wedding of two of his dear friends (Denise and Jim), neither of whom I knew. Both bride and groom sought me out and told me how glad they were that I could come. There was shape-note singing, morris dancing and contra-dancing and a fantastic time was had by all - especially me! I also got to meet more lovely people including a sweet, sweet gentleman by the name of Mal.

On Saturday we drove off to a little township which has a cafe in a cave, explored some antique stores and enjoyed the river before going to the arts museum (very cool) and then saw a documentary about Joan Rivers (fascinating) and finishing with dinner at Pizza Luce's (with a fun story attached).

Sunday was July 4th. So we started the day with a traditional block party at Matt and Deb's with a children's bike parade (or race), more morris dancing, a jazz band, singing and much neighbourly entertainment. I also managed to squeeze in a chance to run off and meet another friend, Yevgeny, for coffee where we talked about scuba diving and the Con I hadn't made time to attend). We ended the day with dinner with Michael and daughters followed by fireworks. By this point I was taking painkillers every 4 hours just to be able to talk, so I was getting a bit worried.

Monday we'd planned to go to the Taste of Minnesota festival, but I asked instead if I could go to a doctor (after talking with my travel insurance people first). The doctor was lovely, ran some tests and advised me to take various over-the-counter drugs. They helped immensely, and made it possible for me to attend the sea shanty singing that evening (although the drugs weren't quite good enough to allow me to sing).

The next day was a day of sad farewells. I felt so welcome and adopted into Steven's crowd that I would have loved to stay in Minneapolis for another month! However, it was time for my next adventure, so Steven drove Mal and I to the airport and he headed off to work. Mal I and had some minor fun getting through security, caught our planes in different directions, and thus far, lived happily ever after.

Two weeks on, and I might be over whatever it was that made me sick, too.

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 30 June 2010

chromatic — 2010-07-03T08:13:30+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 30 June 2010. Allison, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Allison:

working on Parrot packages for Debian experimental
seems like a good idea to do that before the 2.6 supported release
there was also a request for Rakudo packages
not sure if I'm the best person to do it

Patrick:

I'm sure we should package Rakudo Star

Allison:

Debian had a packager for those, but I haven't looked at the packages
this'd be an early run of what we'll do with Rakudo Star

Patrick:

we're not quite ready for packaging that yet
maybe a couple of weeks
finished the List and Iterator types for the #30 release
adjusted Rakudo's Associative and Positional roles
much cleaner implementation now
that'll require a few small spec changes
redid Rakudo's container types
more robust
preparing for autovivification of hashes and arrays
expect to finish those in the next couple of days
there was no container model previously; the code was consequently crufty
lots of cleanup of incorrect assumptions
Rakudo lists are now properly lazy
comment syntax fixed
ROADMAP updated
fixed the meaning of Nil; it's defined, not undefined
added the sink prefix (?)
fixed setting of $!
started fixing bugs and closing tickets on Monday, did 15 or 20
mostly already fixed in the previous couple of weeks
looking at the implementation of the series operator
spec is self-contradictory or ambiguous or both
waiting for Larry's clarification
fixed a bug in $*ARGFILES
had a nice contribution of that implementation last week
that behavior works on any set of files, not just those on the command line
working on autoviv
have some regex backtracking bugs to fix
will work on closures after that
put together three new YAPC presentations
the Rakudo Star presentation will become a video cast or a blog post or both

worked on a slew of Parrot optimizations for Rakudo
have a few more to go
might have to create a Rakudo branch temporarily
will try to help merge the new GC
working on a metamodel for Parrot objects, informed by Perl 6 and Moose

Modern Perl: The (Draft) Book

chromatic — 2010-06-28T23:43:33+00:00

This took longer than I expected, but the draft of the Modern Perl book is available for review. I'm especially interested in hearing from people who don't consider themselves expert Perl 5 programmers. The goal of the book is to explain how Perl 5 works (and how to write Perl 5 effectively) to help novices become adepts.

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 16 June 2010

chromatic — 2010-06-26T17:07:30+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 16 June 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

documented TOP (again), and explained how parsing is initiated and how it actually works
series operator (...) now picks a monotonic function when using single characters as endpoints
STD can now catch duplicates involving protos as well as onlys
STD no longer advises removal of parens on spaceless sub() declaration
mostly advised sorear and pmichaud
Stefan is finishing the boostrap of the STD parser
also working on adding a parallel NFA and DFA engine
no, he doesn't want to generate all the states in advance
it works faster lazily

Allison:

working on chroot environments with something more secure than chroot
relevant to building Parrot packages
looking at some bugs for Will

Patrick:

Rakudo developers decided not to make extra special effort to make a June release of Rakudo Star
the calendar works against us
the new date for the release is July 29
we're I comfortable with hitting that target
we won't be happy with the results of moving heaven and earth to release in June
there are lots of advantages
one disadvantage is not having Rakudo Star at YAPC::NA
one big advantage is using the supported Parrot 2.6 release as the basis
I'll write a post outlining the plan in the next couple of days
otherwise working on lists and interators in Perl 6 and Rakudo
after deciding to make iterators immutable, Larry and I realized that solves many problems
everything works out as plain as day after that
very happy with that design
the incorrect assumptions of the old model were pervasive
replacing the old pieces is taking a while, which is no surprise
this approach feels right though
the new branch does things no previous version could do
slices work much better, for example
metaoperators work properly
map is lazy
slurpy arguments in lists are lazy by default
no weird binding or action at a distance problems
plenty of changes to Associative and Positional roles
those are now super clean and may be lazy
more features work
~30 failing tests (not test files, just tests) now, ~500 last night
most of the current failures are minor
will try to merge the branch before the release
replacing lots of ugly code with fewer lines of elegant code
Jonathan and others have worked on lots of other pieces
adding plenty of new features
looking forward to tomorrow's release

editing the Rakudo book
moving the Rakudo release date may let us have a printed book available about the same time
depends on how much there is left to write

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 09 June 2010

chromatic — 2010-06-24T12:24:33+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 09 June 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

not much spec change this week
figured out a syntax for a regex block to return more than one cursor
based on gather/take
in STD hacking, continued to assist Stefan O'Rear in getting STD bootstrapped via viv
now that it's bootstrapped, we're refactoring things that make sense now
we're now starting to move bits of Cursor code from Perl 5 into Perl 6
refactoring the grammar for sanity of design
started upgrading STD to normal Perl 6 syntax where it previously catered to gimme5's limitations
for example, switched STD's old .<_from> and .<_pos> hash lookups to using .from and .pos accessors
started the prep work for moving EXPR out of STD to make it generally available to any grammar wanting operator precedence
in STD parsing, made Perl 5 $< detection have a longer token to avoid confusion with match variables
STD no longer attempts two-terms detection on infix_circumfix_meta_operator
STD now parses >>R~<< correctly, or at least dwimmily
STD doesn't complain about P5isms in printf formats like "%{$count}s"
STD was parsing /m and /s with the opposite semantics
termish now localizes $*MULTINESS in its scope so that inner declarations aren't accidentally multified
STD now carps about package Foo; as a Perl 5 construct

Allison:

talked to Chris Shiflett, a PHP developer, on someone from the PHP community to sit on the Parrot board
will be in the US for a few weeks

Patrick:

working on list simplification
had a couple of breakthrough ideas on Monday
working on the implementation now
worked out inversion lists for character class matching in regexes
will make them faster, especially with long ranges of character classes
fixed a half-dozen tickets in RT
fixed Rakudo hash constructors
fixed an intermittent bug with colon-pair signatures
two possible parses exist in STD, but we removed an unneeded one in Rakudo
fixed a bug with Parrot's exit opcode
NQP and PAST needed an update not to cheat with PASM constants
I fixed that too
Vasily added multisub and multimethod support to NQP, that was a big plus
fixed the ** quantifier in regexes to understand surrounding whitespace
regex engine tried to match beyond the end of a string, so I added guards for that
will work on lists furiously before the next release
I don't think it'll take long
closures are next, hope to have those in place by the weekend

released a new version of Pod::PseudoPod::LaTeX to support the various books in progress

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 02 June 2010

chromatic — 2010-06-22T01:12:29+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 02 June 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

mostly, I supported sorear in bootstrapping STD to use viv instead of gimme5
his stage 2 and stage 3 now output identical Perl 5 versions of STD
produces a huge amount of warnings
appears to require Perl 5.12 at the moment
working on both of those
S03 refines hyper dwimminess to be more like APL, with modular semantics
S02 refines Blobs to simply be immutable Bufs, with similar generic characteristics
S02 now describes native blob types
implemented post-declaration checks for BEGIN and use, since those can't wait for end of file
STD no longer loses existing bindings when we go to a sublanguage
STD now uses $*GOAL variable only as informative, never as a "stopper"
instead, we create a <stopper> rule for $*GOAL if necessary
can check for that only, instead of that or $*GOAL
answering lots of questions on how STD and viv work besides that

Allison:

did a lot of research on graph color algorithms for register usage algorithms
will finish my finals on Monday

Will:

trying to herd the discussion of dynop libraries
a recent branch to close an old ticket broke a lot of assumptions
some bugs have become more visible because of these changes
hope to get that cleaned up this week

Allison:

I liked your suggestion of bringing back the getstderr and related opcodes

Will:

trying to resurrect Partcl
stuck on a TT #389 closing issue
not sure how to fix that, the way things are now

Patrick:

working on the iterator and list design
brainstorming the implementation
will implement somethine one way or another this week
people keep implementing workarounds for the current system
they'll bite us eventually
Moritz and I worked on making the regex engine returning real Perl 6 objects
that mostly works
exposes some places where lists don't work exactly right
the workarounds there made me replan the list and iterator implementation
answered some questions online
Jonathan added a better backtrace algorithm for Rakudo
reports Perl 6 source lines instead of PIR lines
I'll review his code
think I can borrow it for NQP for all HLLs
Jonathan reports that it was a lot easier in NQP than PIR

trying to answer a few Parrot design questions
looking at the continuation of design from Perl 1 - 4 to Perl 5 and Perl 6
hope to have coding time soon

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 26 May 2010

chromatic — 2010-06-20T19:40:02+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 26 May 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

:() syntax is now always signature
we now use foofix:[...] as the general op form instead of foofix:(...)
refactored the sematics of :nth and :x
:nth() now only ever takes a monotonically increasing list
S03 now explains how "not-raising" works on != and ne
it now basically matches the intuitions of an English speaker via HOP definition of negate metaop
STD sometimes didn't require semi between statements
statement modifiers are expression terminators but not valid statement terminators
an unexpected statement modifier word like if could terminate one statement and start another
fixed up backslashes in character classes to allow \s etc and reject \u etc
STD was accidentally using the same lexpad for different multis
Cursor now treats :() on name extension as a signature always, never as a categorical
we shouldn't introduce the stopper for circumfix until we're in the circumfix, or we can't use the same char on both ends
placeholder messages error messages are now much more informative and correct
we now disallow use of placeholder after same variable has been used as a non-placeholder, even for an outer reference
renamed add_macro (which it doesn't) to add_categorical (which it does)
participating frequently in discussions on semantics both on irc and p6l
working closely with sorear++ as he brings viv closer to bootstrapping, yay!
soon can bootstrap past gimme5

Allison:

worked on Pynie this week in my limited spare time
one goal is to generate the parser directly from the Python grammar
wrote a small, lightweight PEG parser which generates a match tree from the Python 3 grammar
can generate a lexer directly
right now it creates a parse tree
looks similar to the match nodes of NQP-rx
dumps out a tree to the PIR parser
working on PaFo elections for next year, but trying to delegate those
will have more time after June 7

Will:

working on Perl 6 advent tests
many more people are doing more work than me
liasing with Rakudo folks for any important Parrot bugs before the Rakudo Star release
my current direction there is "don't break anything"

Patrick:

sorear added hash flattening to NQP
lots of work on closures in PAST and NQP
they properly clone
fixes some lexical problems
need to get that to work in Rakudo
that's tougher; Rakudo has to wrap Parrot subs
wrapper object needs cloning as well, along with its attributes
we'll add a new PAST node type to help
that node understands contexts
essentially a way to add void context optimizations to your AST
that solves many problems in Rakudo beyond closures
added a setting into NQP along with its test suite
not automatically loaded, but available
contains standard hash and array methods
Parrot's ops2c project uses those
other people can update and enhance that setting as necessary
NQP also has the ability to parse type names
NQP doesn't do anything with them yet
eventually they'll allow the use of multis
cleaning up some NQP bugs regarding lexicals and package storage of subs
Bruce Keeler enabled variable interpolations in regexes
working on some refactorings to simplify that approach
works in NQP and Rakudo now
that's a feature we've never had before
Rakudo's REPL now works better, thanks to sorear
HLLCompiler now written more in NQP as part of that
NQP now can do eval
NQP remembers lexicals in interactive mode now
adding that to Rakudo is more complex
working on that
pleased with the progress on #perl6

reviewing long term plans for GC and Lorito
should have more time free soon

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 19 May 2010

chromatic — 2010-06-16T21:38:09+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 19 May 2010. Larry, Will, and chromatic attended. Patrick added his notes later.

Larry:

S03 makes more explicit that doctrine that ~~ topicalizes, and removes smartmatch table fossils that automatically fall out from that
S05 renames 'accent' to 'mark' for better Unicode conformance
:a and :aa changed to :m and :mm
S05 disrequires retroactive semantics on :samecase and :samemark
the method form must now explicitly add case or mark modifiers to the pattern
regularized mm// to ms// to avoid confusion with new :m ignoremark option
STD now does a bit better at diagnosing bogus ??!! constructs of various sorts
STD now correctly adds operators to symbol tables as subs
CORE.setting now has protos of all the operators so they can be recognized as subs too
Cursor now canonicalize operator names in the symbol table
btw, not quite like specced
STD now reads user's mind on 'Str $toto' to intuit missing declarator
STD now properly diagnoses a typename between routine declarator and sub name

Will:

working on code for Carl Masak, trying to get his poker code example running on Rakudo
both fun and frustrating
some stuff doesn't quite work yet
going through the Advent examples
adding them to spectests
make sure we won't regress on such public examples
other people are helping with that now

will get back to editing the Rakudo book soon
hope to have it in print by YAPC, but no guarantee

Patrick:

fixed closures in NQP, as a precursor for fixing them in Rakudo
worked with sorear on REPL in Rakudo and PCT in general
ported the NQP "standard library" done by japhb++, bacek++, and many others into the nqp-rx repository and made it part of the standard build sequence for nqp and Parrot
decided we need a new "context sensitive" node type in PAST, will be used to create proper closures and to handle sink context
worked with bacek on adding better multimethod support to PAST and nqp-rx
discovered a problem with lexical subs in NQP being automatically entered into the package namespace (and some existing code relying on this behavior)
did some initial fixes to at least get things entered properly, but a complete fix may require a deprecation cycle
plan to review others' patches this week
plan to fix REPL, closures, and sink context in Rakudo (since those are currently large pain points)
plan to work on loops and iterators after that

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 12 May 2010

chromatic — 2010-06-16T01:47:02+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 12 May 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, and Will attended.

Larry:

clarified usage of brackets around infixes
added various 128-bit types to the spec; we might make them arbitrarily extensible via role
at least LLVM could support this, even to non-powers-of-two sizes
modernized the paleolithic grammatical category description in S02
STD now uses double-quote rules for interpolating @foo[] into regex
STD now gives better message on 1__3
added the specced 128-bit types to CORE.setting
added minmax function to CORE.setting
implemented circumfix:«X Y» as grammar derivation
currently only allows a >> inside
now also recognizes foofix:("\x[face]") and foofix:("\c[YOUR CHARACTER HERE]") without actually evaluating
playing with factoring yaml out of gimme5, since viv is not likely to go that route.
mostly just answered a lot of questions on irc
egged people on about concurrency issues

Patrick:

thought on handling closures properly
have a solution, just need some time to implement
discussion on changes to CodeString
work on compiler toolkit to avoid CodeString, using StringBuilder instead where possible, in PCT, NQP, and rakudo. Pretty easy, no downstream projects block on a deprecation issue
after that, lists
also been answering questions on interactive mode (REPL) for rakudo et al. (the issue with losing lexicals)

Allison:

resolved the git conversation pretty well (for Parrot's repo migration)
worked on a pure PEG parser (following the paper), straight PIR, single day; now self-parsing. Interesting project, is lightweight. currently has memoization, but that might not be right for us because of backtracking. With some more effort, could probably handle EBNF form (useful for python)
could be setup for developer status for Debian which will improve our packaging status for Debian and Ubuntu

Will:

Parrot CodeString performance improvements
we're definitely faster in branch, but some feedback from pmichaud should help us clean up the API a bit as well, look for those to hit trunk in the next few days
Parrot makefile deps cleanup

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 05 May 2010

chromatic — 2010-05-10T06:07:34+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 05 May 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

various spec updates, some major
removed p5=> description because it's not supported in core
deleted self:sort construct because self isn't a real syntactic category
explained Perl patterns in terms of PEGs, and spec'ed tiebreaking rules explicitly
last but not least, finally purveyed the long-threatened revamp of proto to keep routine and method semantics similar
they all now work much more like the multiple dispatch semantics currently used by STD, where we always call the proto first
the proto is then always in charge of the actual multiple dispatch; it can of course delegate that
and the default for a null body corresponds closely to current semantics
in hacking news, the lexer generator mislaid any alternative that was a bare . pattern, so cursor_fate never called its alternative, oops
took me a long time to run that one down, because it resulted in a horrendous backtrack causing mysterious misplaced errors
revamped character class parsing to be more helpful and correct
STD now check a normal regex bracket's innards for old-school character class, and warns if found
added a .looks_like_cclass method to Cursor to detect most accidental uses of P5 ranges
some valid P6 brackets will complain, but the workarounds are easy
just put whitespace on both ends is one way
removed a few of these old-school-ish character classes from STD
changed :tr language to :cc language since character classes share it
(translation pays more attention to ordering, but the language is the same)
turned out parsing character classes discovered issues in STD; various character classes needed to backslash # that would otherwise be a comment
to that end, we now allow \# in character classes instead of misparsing as unspace
if we find an invalid - in a regex, we now presume we're in an old-school character class and fail with a sorry instead of a panic to give the character class code a shot at it
STD now uses ~ syntax for regex brackets to set $*GOAL correctly
cleaned up recursive panic detection; it was possible to get both false positives and negatives before
STD shouldn't use 'note' to emit a panic inside a suppose because that leaks the message that should be trapped
STD now suppresses duplicate sorry messages more correctly
sorry no longer uses panic in a supposition, but dies directly to throw the exception to the suppose's try block
STD now allows subscripts on regex variables so $x[0] isn't taken as a character class; still needs speccing

Patrick:

can we make them consistent?

Larry:

historically S05 has allowed bare arrays to mean interpolation

Patrick:

we've never had a working implementation of that

Larry:

a bare @ would be illegal

Patrick:

it's currently illegal

Larry:

you'd have to backslash it to match part of an email address
it's not like the @ alternations are a big deal one way or another
that'd be a little more consistent
I forced it to think of the sigil as $ than what it really is

Patrick:

after seeing how Jonathan et all did interpolation for quoted strings, I thought we should do the same thing in regexes

Larry:

STD now has a partial fix to prevent leakage of ::T from role signatures
unfortunately, the current fix will lose signatures of file-scoped generic roles
this probably has to do with not knowing whether we're really going to want a new pad; unfortunately we'd have to look ahead to know that currently
various other minor tweaks and bug fixes in STD and Cursor

Patrick:

mostly responding to messages and reports
should be able to get back to coding full-time and online for the next week
plan to resolve the list and closure issues with NQP and Rakudo
will answer other questions and try to keep other people productive
planning for the Rakudo Star release on June

Allison:

busy with the last week of classes
spent most of it writing a little language with PCT
it was easy to use and easy to swap the stages of PCT
I remembered what Patrick did with LOLCODE
also had a discussion of source code control systems
next week should be more productive
need to work more closely with Debian packagers to get packages into Debian

Will:

cleaning out as many deprecations in Parrot as possible
trying to improve the speed of CodeString after the immutable STRINGs merge
bundling lots of little concats helps
hope to merge in an optimization branch for that by the weekend
want to make that faster or less memory intensive
may require the use of a new StringBuilder for Parrot
hopefully will result in a faster Rakudo build

Patrick:

I've never seen CodeString take a long time
unless you run into memory problems
* discussion of the StringBuilder PMC *

still working on optimizations, particularly CodeString
looking at more PBC and PBC-building optimizations
PBC size went down dramatically and startup improved for Rakudo
should have that much faster for the 2.4 release
will poke at GC tasks starting next week

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 28 April 2010

chromatic — 2010-05-02T00:27:42+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 28 April 2010. Larry, Allison, Jerry, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

caught up on a week's worth of backlog
made a few spec tweaks
discussed them with other people
trying to make error messages more awesome in STD
working on the ability to parse the insides of character classes
STD doesn't like parsing itself recursively there
need to iron out a few things
enum names can now be variables

Allison:

Debian packages ready to ship to Debian sponsors
putting together a list of GC tasks
cleaned out the existing page, have the big things listed
trying to decide which tasks to do first
doing a lot of reading and research
my little language project is due on Monday
HLLCompiler was enormously useful
will start working on the GC stuff next week
should also start a fresh pass through the ticket queue
added a workaround for the final remaining TT #389 bug
Jonathan had a test case

Will:

tried to focus on getting Rakudo blockers removed

spent some time getting Rakudo to work with trunk
will need a Rakudo guts hacker for the last part
worked on the compact_string revamp branch with Vasily
merged now
that makes trunk about 12% faster than the 2.3.0 release
will work on a few Rakudo profiles once it works with trunk again
expect at least a 5% performance improvement there
have some other ideas, but won't do them without profiling first
came up with a scheme to reduce PBC size by coalescing strings
Peter Lobsinger is exploring that

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 21 April 2010

chromatic — 2010-04-28T22:20:35+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 21 April 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, Jerry, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

been under the weather, so didn't get much done other than keeping up with questions
S05 now allows negative quantifier ranges on reversible patterns
S02 now defines the term now to return the current instant
like rand and self, it does not parse as a function, since it never takes arguments
we now specify what kinds of math are allowed on instants and durations
improved error message on attempt to use old-school backreferences in regexes
STD now implements the now term and several other time-related names
we now allow enum names to be "constant variables" so that a class enum can declare an accessor
thinking alot about a better unification of the semantics of protos
this may also solve the current ambiguity in the meaning of postfix parens
in any case, this is for post Rakudo *

Allison:

mainly worked on packaging for Debian and Ubuntu before the release
closed TT #389, no methods in namespaces
collecting thoughts on what we need next from the GC
we've done a lot of small cleanups
now we need to solve some persistent problems
might need to make some fundamental changes, like reducing copying
coming up on my final week of classes, so lots of work there coming up

Will:

updated a spectest
minor ticket wrangling in Rakudo's RT queue

Jerry:

GSoC will make its acceptance announcements soon
expect TPF will get 10 slots

Patrick:

reviewing Rakudo's current state
made a couple of minor NQP patches
reviewing patches, especially from Moritz and Bruce Keeler
should check them in, probably with some refactorings
hope to work on the List implementation, especially laziness and context

fixed as much of line numbering as I found broken
working on branch merges
still looking at optimizations
will focus most energy this month on the sweep-free GC
hope to encourage other people to work on identified optimizations
will review Solomon Foster's Mandlebrot example, especially with regard to performance

Facebook privacy - Instant personalisation and connections

pjf — 2010-04-23T06:31:18+00:00

Facebook privacy - Instant personalisation and connections
Facebook has been announcing a number of changes recently, many of which will impact your privacy. While you may not have seen them hit your account yet, they will almost certainly do so soon.

Connections
In the past, Facebook had a whole bunch of free-form fields for things like location and interests. You could put practically anything you wanted in these, and show them to your friends. For things like interests, there was some basic search features, but they weren't very advanced.

These free-form fields are now changing into "connections". Like existing fan pages, connections represent an actual relationship, rather than just text. Also, just like fan pages, they're public, so you can see all the people who like cooking, or mushrooms. The new connection pages include extra information including text from wikipedia, and an automatic search through both your friends and all public posts to look for content related to that subject. The same applies for your location (hometown and current), your employers, and education!

From an application developer's standpoint, this is a great change. The existing free-form fields were next to useless. From a privacy standpoint, this is an interesting change. It's great to be able to find friends who share your common interests, but because connections are public, you're not just revealing that information to your friends. You're revealing it to the whole wide world. For any user who just accepted the defaults the defaults, I now know the city where you live, who you work for, where you went to school, and what you enjoy doing, in addition to who your friends are, and what you look like.

Luckily, you don't have to convert your interests and locations to connections. However if you don't, those parts of your profile will simply cease to exist. Facebook would really like you to convert to connections, and you'll get a scary looking message about parts of your profile being removed if you don't. Of course, not all of your interests will map to new connections, and those that don't will be discarded in any case, so whatever you do you will be losing information, including potentially the dates of your employment and education. For me, that's not a big deal, but it might be for you. If you do want to continue listing your interests in a free-form and private fashion, I recommend you simply add them to your "about me/bio" section.

If you do convert your interests (and Facebook will ask you to do so sooner or later) then keep in mind that these (along with your existing fan pages) are very public. Your friends, family, employer, potential employer, applications, websites, enemies, and random people on the Internet will all be able to see them. If you don't want that, your only recourse is to remove those connections.

In theory, you can also edit your birthday, and change your age to under 18, which limits what Facebook will publicly disclose about you, although your connections are still very broadly published. Unfortunately, as I discovered the hard way, you can only transform from an adult into a minor once, so if you've edited your birthday in the past you may not be able to change it now. In fact, if you've already converted to the new connection system, then your birthday will no longer show up as something you can edit, so make sure it's set to a date you're happy with before going through the conversion.

Instant Personalisation
Facebook is rolling out changes to allow websites to automatically access your "publicly available information", which includes name, profile picture, gender, friends, and "connections".

What's that, I hear you ask? Are these the same connections that I just added to my profile during the conversion process? They sure are! I bet you just love the idea that when you visit a website, they not only automatically know your name, your location, and your friends, but also a detailed list of your interests, activities, education, and employer!

Luckily, you can turn instant personalisation off. There's a new ticky box on the applications and websites privacy page. For some users, this is on by default, and for others it's off, and I'm not yet sure how that's determined. If it's not ticked now, and you later go through the connections conversion process, then I recommend you go back to double check it's still unchcked.

Having ensured that instant personalisation is disabled, I bet you're feeling pretty safe. However there's a great little clause if you read the fine print: To prevent your friends from sharing any of your information with an instant personalization partner, block the application...

That's right, your friends can share your information. This actually isn't anything new; applications your friends have installed can also view your information, but you probably don't want them sharing your info with the instant personalisation sites either.

So, in addition to unticking a box, you probably want to visit the applications listed in the FAQ entry and block them, too.

While you're at it, I recommend you look at your list of authorised applications as well, and remove any ones that you no longer need. It's very easy to authorise an app these days (in fact, commenting or liking this blog post will do so!), so you might be surprised to see what's there.

Finally, if you want to protect against accidental leakage of your profile information, consider logging out of Facebook before browsing other websites. Sure, this may be a pain in the arse, but Facebook can't share your information if you're not logged in.

Conference Talk at OS Bridge
I'll be talking more about Facebook privacy, along with some practical demonstration of tools, at the Open Source Bridge conference from the 1st-4th June 2010.

Bob Jacobsen interview on FLOSS Weekly

merlyn — 2010-04-23T03:55:11+00:00

Last week, I interviewed Bob Jacobsen for FLOSS Weekly. Bob used Perl's Artistic 1.0 license on some Java code to manage model trains. The code was later patented by an Oregon-based company(!) and then Bob got sued(!!) for Bob distributing the other company's patented code(!!!). The good part of the story is that this is the first test at the US Federal Appeals Court level for an open source license to be enforceable even if no money exchanges hands, and... we won!

Bob spent a lot of time and money on the case though. Listen to the podcast and contribute to his legal defense if you care about open source.

Top-level namespace pollution is evil

belg4mit — 2010-04-22T22:57:26+00:00

Why's it evil? Because not everyone hunts for modules by using a search engine. Because you're less likely to see that you're needlessly reinventing the wheel. et cetera et cetera

People need to read perlmodstyle and think before they upload. Indeed, PAUSE should exact a pound of flesh or some other substitute before accepting top-level modules.

While we're at it, maybe we can thunk people with a clue-by-four who don't include a module description, etc.

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 14 April 2010

chromatic — 2010-04-21T04:09:26+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 14 April 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

on p6l, did a bit of bikeshed paint removal with regard to hyphens vs underscores
S02 now explicitly disallows both whitespace and unspace in top level of an interpolation
per spec change, when STD is parsing an interpolation inside quotes and looking for a possible postfix, we now presume that a backslash belongs to the quotes and is not an unspace
in the src/perl6 directory, renamed all Perl 6 .pm files to .pm6 to avoid confusion
this was necessary because the implementation of STD translates Perl 6 back to the corresponding Perl 5
the ambiguity was causing problems with tools such as NYTProf
Cursor.pmc now prefers .pm6 over .pm in any particular directory when searching for Perl 6 code
as usual lately, most of my hacking work was in improving the human interface of the parser
STD now distinguishes two final messages: "Parse failed" vs "Check failed"
STD now warns on attempts to smartmatch with True or False
STD now distinguishes continuable-but-fatal "sorry" messages from immediately fatal "panic" messages
sorry messages will eventually fail at check time
changed many of STD's semantic errors to use sorry messages when the parse state is not affected
modified moritz++'s conflict marker patch to be more like the Clang compiler's behavior
conflict markers now emit a "sorry" message and continues parsing one side of the conflict
also fixed a buglet that prevented it from processing the conflict marker if first thing in the file
while fixing the vws (vertical white space) rule for that, also changed it so that extra lines are now eaten with \V*\v for consistency
it had be using \N*\v
gimme5 now supports pointing to both ends of missing goal message
STD's "Couldn't find final ..." messages now use that capability to point to both ends of the error
standard quotes now also use the ~ compositor to set the goal and get that behavior
STD will now dwim <<op>> ("Texas hypers") better even if op contains angles
suppressed confusing backtracking on ~<< that produced a misleading quotewords error
some other patches
CORE.setting now recognizes the 'note' function
gimme5 now translates note to print STDERR
cleaned up some unneeded locmesses
Actions.pm now handles prefix metaops without spewing spurious yaml dumps

Allison:

worked on TT #389
the actual fix was about two lines
spent a lot of time fixing tests around it
didn't like the original two-line fix
fixed it in IMCC by passing along the :nsentry flag
NQP-rx still depends on that feature
I understood from Patrick that NQP-rx doesn't need that feature
don't want to launch that before the 2.3 release
worked on a lot of smaller issues
worked on the Parrot Developer Virtual Summit
will talk about some process changes more, as there are details to work out
will work on GC as the next priority
useful for Rakudo in general and Parrot concurrency

Patrick:

catching up on mail and tickets
should get back to coding in the next couple of days

worked on the immutable strings branch
need a couple of changes in the Rakudo binder
now it's time to convince everyone else it's a worthwhile design change
going to work on bugfixes
will try to land the constant string cache
otherwise, added some optimizations

Will:

worked on Partcl
fixed a Parrot bug that broke Rakudo
does Rakudo need TT #389 in 2.3?

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 07 April 2010

chromatic — 2010-04-09T22:07:25+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 07 April 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

clarified that object identity from WHICH may not be a mundane value type
instead object id's are of type ObjAt to avoid type name collisions.
rewrote misleading description of "thunk"
made some clarifications of the desired semantics of buffers
Buf is primarily a role for dealing compact, unsigned integer arrays in a stringy way
but a Buf may be instantiated with other numeric types as well.
removed bogus mentions of Buf8, Buf16, Buf32; only the native buf types are sized that way
STD now actually parses the insides of tr/// and carps about malformed ranges
labels are now stored symbolically as constants rather than types
so no coercion routine is added for the name, so it doesn't collide with the function namespace
labels are now constants with a unique label type to prevent confusion with ordinary constants
module subcompilation now reports the name of the file it's compiling
improved various error messages regarding foreach, !!op, $!{}, EOF, and missing punctuation after blocks

Allison:

worked on line number reporting in HLLs
no ticket to go on, no good examples
didn't make much progress, but didn't have much time
sounds like Christoph and chromatic are working on it
might look at TT #389

you're welcome to it!
let me know if you have questions; it's close

Allison:

no travel plans for the next couple of months
should have a lot more Parrot time
probably time to consider another big project
probably GC related

Patrick:

updated the progress graph last night
up to date as of yesterday
Rakudo's passing over 30,000 tests, which is great

Jerry:

we have 27 mentors signed up for GSoC
a dozen student proposals have come in
the admission period ends Friday, so I expect at least a handful more
looks like a good year for proposals
trying to keep on track of Rakudo development
trying to be a go-between for Rakudo and Parrot
seems like it's helping Rakudo as Parrot addresses issues that come up

Vasily and I fixed the Rakudo performance regression
we're going to experiment with immutable strings in a branch
expect some notable performance improvements there
also worked on the plan to fix line number reporting
need a test harness to help identify problems and avoid regressions
learned my lesson last time I worked on that....

Larry:

I cringe every time I hear "line numbers"
I like what Clang does about highlighting the arguments to functions
it'd be nice if we can do similar

that'd require more changes to Parrot, but it's doable

Larry:

I just want people to bear it in mind

Allison:

there's no reason we can't have richer annotations
our first step is making sure the information we provide them (or they ask for) is accurate
is it time to have another big development meeting for Parrot?
the release is coming up

Jerry:

sounds good

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 31 March 2010

chromatic — 2010-04-05T04:42:21+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 31 March 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

in SpecLand, made it clear that the brackets in pairs are not related to subscripts, but follow the corresponding fatarrow semantics
in particular, name extenders are just strings or list of strings, properly indicated by : or :() in most cases (this includes all operator names).
we now forbid name extension using the :{} keyless adverbial syntax
we don't need that because name extensions are really only supposed to use values, not closures
if we really, really, need to supply a closure as part of a name extension, we can put it in parens, as in :({}).
we can use that notation for supplying a closure as a first argument to a method without requiring a space between the colon and the curly, as in .map:{...}
people keep writing that and expecting it to work, so I thought it would be good to make it work
the colon is still require before the curlies, or it's a hash subscript
we now capitalize the Junction type again because I couldn't get people to stop capitalizing it
also, the native aspect of junctions is not their most salient difference from normal types
conjectured an Each type that autothreads lists like junctions, but is serial and lazy, and is used for its values in list context, not boolean context
in S05, did much cleanup of cursor semantics to reflect what STD and Rakudo actually do these days
retargeted the <&foo> regex assertion form to explicitly call a routine, just like <.foo> always calls a method
a bare <foo> assertion now prefers to call a lexical function if visible, or calls as a method in current grammar if not
this is a compile-time distinction, not a fallback at run time
in code hacking, continued debugging of the backtracking transactions I added last week
gimme5 now sets the correct xact on || alternations
deleted more of the transactions that are no longer needed when building match results that are no longer hypothetical
a LazyMap now always passes through the first result regardless of its associated commit transaction state
that's because the first cursor in a lazy list always represents the current match hypothesis, not a future hypothesis that needs pruning
STD now parses to the new specs regarding name extensions not including :{}
now allow colon form of method arguments to omit the space if the next char is a left curly, which is what people seem to expect anyway
note that this makes the closure the first argument, not the only argument
STD now gives more useful error messages when user says things like 'if' as a function call (if(...) {...}), or a statement control like 'given' where one isn't expected ($x = given {...})
STD now properly objects to unrecognized internal regex modifiers such as :has
improved the message on adverbs with empty angles (:foo<>) to list some better options
the problem arises when people think that the angles produce a null string, when in fact they produce a Nil list
other malformed pairs are also better diagnosed, such as :! not followed by an identifier, or pairs with duplicate arguments
added a new rule that traps all warnings and errors
STD now uses suppose in place of custom try blocks in diagnosing such things as two terms in a row, or unexpected infixes
also uses suppose to soften the warning about backtick-less embedded comments by not complaining if the supposed comment eats the whole line anyway
put in some code to de-dup identical warnings
STD now includes the signature's return type (after -->) in the check for redundant 'of' types
did various tiny speed tweaks, fossil removals
started playing with how to mark sink context and pure operations
split out Actions.pm from viv so that it can be used by other STD-based AST builders
this is in preparation for propagating attributes up and down the AST such as sink context and purity
eventually this will result in "Useless use of" messages where appropriate, not to mention the ability to do constant folding

Allison:

worked on the compact_pool() function
split it into a series of smaller functions
it could use more work, but it's an improvement
found one possible bug
worked on some documentation, especially for PMC attributes

Patrick:

reviewed some patches to add variable handling in regexes
they need some changes, but the overall concept is good
reviewed a few other messages
most of my time is going toward my family
hope to get more time to be more active in the next couple of days, but I can't promise that yet

Will:

talked to Jonathan about Rakudo Star priorities
he's very pleased with the memory fixes
the next thing on his list is getting good line numbers in reported errors
closing tickets
working to get rid of the last recursive Makefile
may wait until after the new release, when we remove a lot of deprecated things
practicing my NQP skills by working on Tcl again

worked on the Rakudo memory problems
Vasily and I fixed the big memory use problem
still some performance tuning to do there
wrote up tasklists for two other important performance pieces
will work on line numbers after we get performance back

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 24 March 2010

chromatic — 2010-03-31T21:20:11+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 24 March 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

clarified that nearly all normal operators autothread, including === and eqv
specced the \| parcel parameter syntax
documented that R metaoperator does not change associativity
clarified that trusts traits do not extend to child classes, and moritz++ specced it
in STD, we now suppress spurious errors from badinfix lookahead (and react more accurately to bogus terms)
now put the error location pointer before a bad infix, not after
we no longer assume missing block punctuation is always semi or comma, but keep them as a suggestion
missing punctuation message now points before any whitespace
awesomified error message about no unspace in regexes to explain how to quote space or #
pass single coeff to radcalc to make :16<.BABEFACE> easier to allow
gives better message on missing ** part of radix literals
worked around fact that :: doesn't correctly suppress relexing of multi tokens
scrapped the workaround and did a complete refactor of commit point transactions; no longer uses exceptions to commit
instead, it walks the current commit chain to the proper commit target to disable choosers that should not choose any more options
commit chain aliasing and forking to make a cactus stack is now managed by cursors, mostly transparently
weighed in on the subject of stability domains (or lack thereof) in Rakudo *

Patrick:

still working on personal issues, but hope to have some resolution by Saturday
haven't had much time to work on Rakudo, but show up on #perl6 to give advice sometimes
read Larry's email to the list; it was very helpful

Allison:

met some interesting people at SxSW doing open source education technology
reviewing the roadmap
the GC sounds like the most important thing to work on next
trying to catch up from having spotty network access lately

Jerry:

the other Rakudo developers have started weekly planning meetings
Jonathan has taken the lead
plenty of contributors are in the meeting and offered to take on new tasks
Rakudo Star may have a smaller scope, but it'll still come out in Q2
it's nice to see that the Rakudo community continues even as Patrick has an extended absence
still some Parrot issues affecting Rakudo
PaFo hopes to have its 501(c)3 application done by summer

bugfixes
minor optimizations
helped merge the PCC refactor branch
working on Rakudo memory issues (long analysis follows, partly Parrot GC and partly NQP behavior)

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 17 March 2010

chromatic — 2010-03-31T21:17:44+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 17 March 2010. Larry, Allison, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

documented which ops don't autoclose with *, including assignment
conjectured a generalization of the closure-calling context (value-only lists) that subscripts enforce
this generalization might allow the autoclosing of some of the current exceptions such as 1..*
added Z to go with X metaop; documented that X and Z desugar to higher-order methods, crosswith and zipwith
speculate about how to zip/cross dwimmily with non-identical ops; possibly creating a real use case for surreal precedence
however, for now sticking with conservative approach of requiring parens on differing list infixes
hacking on viv again
trying to get that bootstrapped, so I don't have to use gimme5
unbitrotted viv --p6 so it exactly reproduces STD.pm again
various developments with viv --p5 toward replacing gimme5
should make it easier to emit other parsers eventually
may emit Rakudo code someday
it's a race to see whether STD can do that before the current Rakudo parser resyncs with STD
anyone who wants to bootstrap on some other VM might want to use that
mostly tired of writing in the subset of Perl 6 that gimme5 understands
mostly hacking on better error messages, as always
catches use of non-$ hard reference
STD now read minds of people who forget that ".meth I" is a two-terms-in-a-row error
now produces good messages on attempts to use y/// or tr/a-z/A-Z/ syntax
now reports "previous line missing its semicolon" in the unexpected block checker
ambiguous use of . probably indicates p5-think, not missing method parens
STD now has in a q-like sublanguage for tr/// string parsing
implements the MONKEY_TYPING constraint on augment and supersede declarators
various random cleanups and bugfixes
added Z metaoperator
lots of works on regex flags to unify them into a single %*RX structure at parse time
makes it easier to do all of the lexical scoping in parallel
can now remap run-time's $?FOO variables to parser's $*FOO dynamic variables
otherwise, bugfixes, spec cleanup, and test cleanup

Allison:

working on tickets
updating the Parrot roadmap to match our Rakudo Star support plan
working on the mini-language in NQP for a class assignment
found a new Pynie developer who saw my talk at Pycon
may be doing a Summer of Code project in it
answering lots of questions on IRC and helping out with ideas

working on lots of little bugs for Parrot
should have the method namespace bug fixed, with help from Andrew
exploring some optimization possibilities
should be able to merge the PCC refactor shortly
Allison, see TT #1511

Allison:

we need to add a new opcode, something like set_want
call it to update the CallContext with expected return information

works a bit like Perl 5 there
we could use that information for MMD, that'd be interesting

Ada Lovelace Day (Part 2)

pjf — 2010-03-25T14:36:27+00:00

Ada Lovelace Day (Part 2)
Today is Ada Lovelace continuation day; a day for continuing blog posts reflecting on the awesome contributions of women to science and technology. Here is my continuation from my previous post of my personal heroines.

Selena Deckelmann (@selenamarie)
Wow. Selena. Where do I start? Selena does everything. She runs the Open Source Bridge conference, the Portland Postgres User Group (PDXPUG) with @gorthx, the Code'n'Splode tech group, and gives talks at Ignite Portland and numerous conferences worldwide. She has an amazing garden, keeps chickens about as well as I do, and boundless energy.

And I mean boundless energy. Selena seems to be awake before dawn, will party into the night, and seems to always have half a dozen projects on the go at once. Selena coming off a trans-pacific flight is only slightly less bouncy than normal. As if that wasn't enough, she's also an amazing host, and was kind enough to let Jacinta and myself crash at her place last year when we were visiting Portland.

Selena is also an amazing public speaker, a great storyteller, knows more about databases than anyone else I know, and went to Nigeria to help combat election fraud. She is well-versed in awesome.

Selena is responsible for convincing me that I really need a pull-up bar at home.

Karen Pauley (@keiosu)
I first met Karen at a Sydney Perl Mongers meeting a few years back. Karen is the Steering Committee Chair of the Perl Foundation, and is quite frankly one of the most friendliest and interesting people I've ever met.

Karen is responsible for making sure things get done, and a lot of her work is behind the scenes. In fact, I think it would be correct to say that Karen is awesome at meta-work; she has the rather unenviable task of encouraging technically minded people to do productive things. Her talk at the Open Source Developers Conference on managing volunteers was brilliant.

I'm personally indebted to Karen for listening to all my crazy ideas, sending me the most amazing Christmas Cards from Japan, providing fashion advice, making me laugh (a lot!), being an awesome person to hang out with at conferences, and for standing in the hot Australian sun with a digital SLR. If you've seen photos of me draped over a nice looking sports car, then that's probably Karen's work. ;)

I aspire to become anywhere near as good a conversationalist as Karen.

Mary Jane "MJ" Kelly (@mjmojo)
I met Mary Jane completely by chance at OSCON last year. At the time, I thought that she was pretty darn awesome. What I didn't realise is that she's much more awesome than I first thought.

Mary Jane is full of ideas. Cool ideas. Ideas which involve industrial cutting lasers, 3D printers, quilts, robots, fractals, untraditional business cards, topography, steampunk, using tattoos for social hacking, and adventures!

Better still, MJ doesn't just have great ideas, she implements them too! I'm hugely looking forward to seeing her talk at this year's OSCON, which is all about hacker spaces and building awesome things.

Mary Jane is actively involved in computer security, particularly in the field of anti-fraud technologies in on-line gaming. MJ founded the Girls In Tech Seattle chapter, and organised the 2007 Northwest Security Symposium.

MJ has a wicked sense of humour that never fails to make me smile, shares my love of costumes and cool events, and is solely responsible for my knowledge of waffle-makers.

Honourable mentions
There are a lot more women in technology who have been hugely influential in my life, either by changing the way that I think, or from teaching me amazing new things. In particular, I'd love to give a special mention to Leslie Hawthorn, Sulamita Garcia, Emma Jane Hogbin, Allison Randal, Audrey Tang, Jenine Abarbanel, Akkana Peck, Brianna Laugher, Brenda Wallace, Mary Gardiner, Donna Benjamin, Raena Jackson-Armitage, Pia Waugh, Sarah Stokely, Ricky Buchanan, Lindsey Kuper, and Liz Henry.

I don't have an Ada Lovelace Day list on twitter, but I do have my techwomen list, which includes all of the above and more.

Fixing Mailman with Perl

BooK — 2010-03-25T01:07:02+00:00

Mailman is useful. Mailman works. Mailman is ubiquitous. I am subscribed to over 50 mailing-lists managed by Mailman.

But Mailmand is software, and therefore hateful.

My particular Mailman hate is the nodupes parameter.

Avoid duplicate copies of messages?
When you are listed explicitly in the To: or Cc: headers of a list message, you can opt to not receive another copy from the mailing list. Select Yes to avoid receiving copies from the mailing list; select No to receive copies.
If the list has member personalized messages enabled, and you elect to receive copies, every copy will have a X-Mailman-Copy: yes header added to it.

I like duplicate email. Moreover, I like the List-Id header that makes emails sent through a list special (at least in the sense that they can be filtered automatically by more tools, and I can just delete the stuff that piles up in my Inbox). And by the way, how could Mailman be really sure that I got that other copy? Just because the headers say so? Bah.

Oh, and I also hate the fact that Set globally never worked for me with this option.

So, because I'm lazy, and I don't want to go clikety-click to first, get a reminder of the random password that was assigned to me years ago, and two, login and change that annoying option, and because I don't want to do that fifty times, over and over again...

I wrote and put on CPAN WWW::Mailman, designed to automate that kind of tedious task out of my life (and hopefully yours). Examples included, I know you're lazy too.

PS: I've been told there is a command-line interface to Mailman, but it is reserved to people managing Mailman on the server.

Ada Lovelace Day (Part 1)

pjf — 2010-03-24T11:59:48+00:00

Ada Lovelace Day (Part 1)
Today is Ada Lovelace day; a day for reflection on the awesome contributions of women to science and technology. Today, I would like to pay tribute to some of my personal heroines, and as you'll see, there's quite a few of them. I've tried to list them in roughly chronological order.

Dr Katherine Phelps
In my early teens I had a Commodore 64 with a 1200/75 baud modem, which I used to access local bulletin board systems (BBSes). This was the start of what I would discover was a lifelong joy of communicating with people from behind the safety of a monitor, or in the case of the C64, a television.

Katherine, and her husband Andrew, ran one such local BBS called the Rainbow Connection, and I met them both at a BBS meet-up. Katherine seems to have a knack for encouraging younger people to excel, and taught me the basics of HTML, and even had me editing web-pages for Glass Wings and other websites. In fact, it's due to Katherine that I got my first exposure to the Internet and Internet programming.

Today, Katherine is still prominent in the fields of storytelling, interactive fiction, game-writing, and comedy. Katherine is almost wholly responsible for me getting into Japanese Animation, by showing me an nth generation, unsubtitled, videotape of My Neighbour Totoro, with herself and Andrew providing a very amusing translation as we watched. ;)

Kirrily 'Skud' Robert (@Skud)
I met Skud though Katherine, also while I was still at high school. At the time I was living with my parents as a quiet, introverted geek. All of my friends, and most of the technical people I knew, were also quiet and introverted types.

Skud pretty much shattered all the stereotypes I had for what it was to be technical. She was outgoing, opinionated, pushed boundries, made things happen, was extremely good with people, had unconventional social views, and was way cooler than me. She still is.

Skud has had a massive influence on my life. She started her own business (Netizen) and wrote a set of course manuals on Perl. Some years later, that same writing would form the basis of Perl Training Australia's own course manuals. Skud has been highly influential in the Geek Feminism movement (which has both a blog and wiki), and gave a critical keynote entitled standing out in the crowd at OSCON 2009.

Often I feel that whenever I discover a new experience, it's actually something Skud has been doing for at least a decade. I still fondly remember Skud giving me advice on etiquette at a rather incredible FOSS party a few years back. In fact, etiquette is another thing Skud is rather good at. ;)

Skud continues to be one of my most favourite people in the world, and I was delighted to have the chance to visit her in San Francisco last year after OSCON. My personal motto, never refuse an adventure, was directly lifted from one of Skud's new year's resolutions.

Jacinta Richardson (@jarichaust)
Once I got to university, I started an anime club. One year, working behind the desk, and with my hair in pigtails and balloons, a girl approached and asked about the club. At the end of the conversation she said "I might come back later", which when advertising an anime club usually translates to: "I think you're a complete freak, and I hope to never see you again in my life."

To cut a long story short, she came back, and she was studying Software Engineering. ;)

Jacinta was a receipient of a 2008 White Camel Award for outstanding contributions to the Perl community. Along with running Perl Training Australia, she's also one of the original organisers of the Open Source Developers' Conference, has helped with countless Perl Mongers meetings, and is largely responsible for our Perl Tips newsletter.

Jacinta also does a lot of behind the scenes work which is not easily seen. She has contacts in practically every user group in Australia, so Jacinta is often involved when organisation of Australian-wide events are needed. At conferences she's often giving up her own time to coach nervous speakers (including me!). In fact, Jacinta even had a hand in one of my most favourite talks of all time, @webchick's Women in FLOSS.

Emily Taylor (@Domino_EQ2)
I met Emily shortly after a phone-call from Jacinta saying that I was going to have a late addition to my Perl class. Emily arrived at lunchtime, and started as a bright, attentive student; she quickly caught up with the rest of the class, showed genuine talent, and was working on advanced exercises in no time.

However what got me really excited was why Emily was learning Perl. By afternoon of the first day, I was calling back to the office to say that our new student was awesome, and she was going to apply for the position of head tradeskill developer for Everquest II (EQ2). However I think it two at least two weeks until I discovered she was in my guild!

Now, Emily is indeed the grand tradeskill developer for EQ2. She has an awesome blog on MMO tradeskilling and MMOs in general. More importantly for Ada Lovelace day, she's also an active contributor to the Gamers In Real Life (GIRL) blog.

Emily presently lives in San Diego, where she distracts me yearly with photographs from Comic-con, and disagrees with me about what breakfast spreads are appropriate on toast.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's continuation of this post.

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 10 March 2010

chromatic — 2010-03-23T01:37:49+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 10 March 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

scrapped @array[%100_000] modular subscript notation in favor of a more general mapping closure
put back :s file test, removed :z, :T, :B, :M, :A, :C
clarified that these are defined on IO, not on strings
deprecated the {*} and #= reduction stub notations in grammars
attributive parameters now default to is copy binding; but easy for an attribute to override this with is ref
tried to move operator definitions to CORE; found one approach that doesn't work and abandoned it
STD now allows _ in numeric variable names like $10_000.
factored out curlycheck so we can use it on any trailing curly
postcircumfix:<{ }> now uses curlycheck for consistency
STD now speculates missing semicolon when two terms in a row are separated by at least one newline
removed mention of *.notdef in favor of :!defined
still need to remove it from the spec though
ambiguously rebound outer lexicals now detected even if ambiguity propagates from an inner scope
reports more pertinent information in that case so the difficulty can be understood by the user
various random debugger refactorings
properly scope dynamic package names for block-oriented packages to include name declaration
package_def of ; packages now eats statementlist itself to stay inside proper scope
much work on package qualified names
correctly parse <$x> part of FOO::<$x> as part of variable name
correctly follow symbolically indirected OUTER:: links
find_top_pkg no longer cares if name ends in ::
STD now figures out whether initial components lead to package or lexical scope
no longer scans outer scopes on qualified names
now handles FOO::<$x> form in check_variable
no longer checks for @/% mistakes on qualified names

Patrick:

haven't had much hacking time lately due to personal demands
should be able to hack again later today and the rest of the week

Allison:

worked on the PCC refactor
that went well; the hackathon was good
it didn't pull in a lot of people, but me dedicating the weekend to it was helpful
also pulled in a few other people willing to try things out
we made good progress
our initial task is over
we're in the nebulous stage of debugging
need to review a change in optional return values
also worked on Ubuntu and Debian packaging
Parrot 2.0 is in both
it'll be in April's Lucid Lynx Ubuntu

Jerry:

Google Summer of Code is starting
TPF and PaFo are teaming up this year
we're working on the organization application
Jonathan Leto is leading things and I'm backing him up
we're looking for mentors and ideas; see the TPF GSoC wiki page

Will:

started going through Rakudo's RT queue
did more Parrot building and cleanup work
no longer invoking Perl to invoke the C compiler for each build file
shaved some time off the build
eliminated one recursive make, leaving two
then I can remove more things from config

worked on a bunch of branches
fixed a couple of bugs
hope to get more bug fixing time in

Gone

Ovid — 2010-03-14T08:02:43+00:00

Like many others, I'm no longer posting here very much. You'll find my new technical journal at blogs.perl.org. It's much shinier.

As you can see, use.perl visits have been dropping for a while (blogs.perl.org is too new to show up on that search) and the front page of use.perl has been sadly neglected. As for blogs.perl.org, after an initial rough start, plenty of people are switching over and are very happy with the shiny.

I have fond memories of use.perl.org, but it's just too old and out-of-date. Come on over to our new platform and look around. Plus, tell us what you want changed about it. (To be fair, while I was involved in the project to get it launched (mostly kibitzing and asking why things were stalled -- I'm such a marketroid :), the hands-on work was Dave Cross, Aaron Crane and the wonderful folks at SixApart.)

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 03 March 2010

chromatic — 2010-03-13T23:19:22+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 03 March 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

noted how lastcall allows nextsame control of nested dispatchers
reserved the final paren-based shape declaration syntax without committing to it meaning anything
clarified that Nil itself is defined but likes to produce undefined values when indexed
added some clarifications of how the series operator deals with type information
clarified that Pair.ACCEPTS uses "so" and "not" semantics so :s returns True or False
removed the 1/2 and +2-3i literal forms, now rely on angle forms <1/2> and <+2-3i> for literals, and the bare forms now rely on constant folding rather than a fragile special syntax
in STD, made undeclared variables more fatal
STD now tries to be helpful if the user makes the typical P5-ish variant-sigil mistake on arrays and hashes
also improved error message on the -{}> kind of mistake that P5 programmers will make
my $a, $b now gives better message
STD now reserves the () shape syntax per current spec
fixed regression on indirect method knowing that method name is not bound early
moved unexpected-!! panic from infixstoppers to infix:<!!> for better extensibility
so a user's infix definition isn't ignored if it starts with !!
you can define user operators starting with that, and it only complains for the right reasons now
STD now gives an accurate message when a prefix is missing its term
removed deprecated rational and complex literal forms from STD
much preliminary work for moving operator defs to CORE.setting, not yet checked in
only blocker is not being in Copenhagen

Patrick:

Jonathan, Carl, Moritz, and Martin will be there
I proposed a panel discussion instead of my talk on Tuesday afternoon at 3 pm
I'll be online then
can't make it due to sudden personal reasons
will be online quite a bit the next few days though
can participate in the hackathon remotely
worked mostly on helping other people get their tasks done
updated the parser to handle more operator conditions
working toward enabling user-defined operators
quite a few new people submitted patches
several were non-trivial
one patch put grammars, regexes, and tokens back in Rakudo
that's not trivial and it worked pretty well
I'm reviewing patches and making comments
lots of good progress
expect lots more during the hackathon

Allison:

going to work on code stuff this weekend instead of traveling
had a very productive trip
glad to be home to get work done
working on the PCC branch this week
should be, fingers crossed, small and easy to get done
want to avoid creature feeping
get the re-ordering through and move on

Jerry:

having trouble building Rakudo on Windows
have time to debug with people online
this is preventing me from talking to Patrick about and working on S19

Patrick:

we can work on that tomorrow

Will:

saw that problem on p6c as well
fixed a Parrot bug for Patrick related to STRING indices
we have some speed fixes on top of that
still working on the build cleanup
hope to merge to trunk in the next two or three days

haven't had and won't have much time
fixed a few bugs
working on helping other people get stuff done

Jerry:

is there a hackathon or meeting time available after OSCON?

Allison:

recommend the weekend after

Patrick:

there'd have to be a hackathon for me to get TPF sponsorship

Jerry:

the pace of spec changes has picked up
any ideas what's driving that?
is it different from before?
was the end-of-year lull the same as before?

Larry:

everyone did take a break over Christmas
most of the changes are still simplifications
or responses to implementation issues
dealing with inconsistencies

Patrick:

a lot of implementation issues have come up over the past three weeks

Larry:

ng has flushed out a lot of design issues

Jerry:

that's great!

Patrick:

that's great for Larry, but I have a deadline!

Allison:

remember, it's a stake in the ground
"This is a release of Perl 6 you can use NOW!"

Patrick:

we're driving the spec with regard to lists and arrays

Larry:

they essentially have the same structure
they need separate typology
you need to know whether to clone an iterator
that's the only reason you have to know

Patrick:

did you see my comment about binding being the distinguishing feature?

Larry:

I think about that in inside out terms
not sure I can put that in words yet
had a conversation with Solomon about the FP view of iterators and arrays
that's some of my thinking
do we promise to hold a pointer fixed, or go on to the next thing?
whether that thing is persistent is mostly the bailiwick of the GC, from the standpoint of the language

Patrick:

I wasn't sure how that applied to my specific context
maybe I should work up a description of words or implementation
some lists I want to keep around reified elements
some lists I don't
the distinction is whether it's bound to any variable

Larry:

may depend on what it's bound to
we might make the keeparound promise only for binding to @

Patrick:

I came up with binding to $ examples
we can get laziness but eat up a ton of memory
if we throw things away when iterating, we get more things wrong

Larry:

it's a matter of tracking
are we bound to something that tells the GC to keep the rest of the list around?
that's the FP view

Patrick:

that's not just a GC view
it's how people refer to them
my GC is taken care of by my virtual machine anyway
it's about reachability from the HLL
or did you see it disappear

Larry:

that's whether you have a reference to it

Patrick:

how do you know whether to keep a reference to it?
I've produced this element
can I send it back to the caller
or do I need to keep it around so something else can get to it
if the iterator itself is bound, you keep the reference
if it's not bound, you can return it but not keep the reference around
I'll write up my thoughts

Jerry:

will these changes settle down after Rakudo *?
are they a precursor to that release?
will they continue afterward?
will Rakudo * go stale?
that's a tough one to answer

Patrick:

I can't guarantee stability at this point
we want a useful release
we'd like not to have any deprecations after that point
given how implementations and applications drive implementations
Rakudo * exists to encourage people to develop applications
we've never made that stability an explicit goal for Rakudo *
we'll probably institute deprecation cycles when it comes out
we don't want to change the world out from under people
it doesn't represent a spec freeze
thinking of a separate distribution release from the compiler release
a three month stability cycle of releases for Rakudo *
a different point of view
any distribution release doesn't have to be tied to the newest compiler release
I see Rakudo * as a series of releases, not a single release

Headsup on command line for shortcuts in Windows XP

bart — 2010-03-02T14:26:35+00:00

For Strawberry Perl, and Padre, I use a custom entry in the Start Menu, which technically is a shortcut (*.LNK file). For example, for Padre the command line in the shortcut file was:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /c PATH=c:\strawberry\perl\bin;c:\strawberry\c\bin;%PATH% && padre

Likewise, the command line for my Strawberry shell was:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /k PATH=c:\strawberry\perl\bin;c:\strawberry\c\bin;%PATH%

Overnight, these both stopped working.

After a bit of puzzling, I figured out that a new program had been installed by Windows Update, and this had added a new directory to PATH. As a result, after the environment variable was substituted with its real value, the length of the expanded command line was now longer than 256 bytes, and now PATH got truncated.

Remember, folks:

The length of the command line for a shortcut, after expansion, should never be longer than 256 bytes.

If you put the code for modification of PATH in a *.BAT file, no such restriction applies.

So now, my shortcut to start the command shell is:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /k c:\strawberry\strawberry_path.bat

where c:\strawberry\strawberry_path.bat contains the lines

@echo off PATH=C:\strawberry\c\bin;C:\strawberry\perl\bin;%PATH%

which makes it easier for me to add more Perl based tools that depend on these entries in PATH: I now have a central location for the definition, if I ever need to add or modify a directory.

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 24 February 2010

chromatic — 2010-03-02T05:12:09+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 24 February 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

my work last week was almost entirely responsive to various discussions on irc and p6l, even when it doesn't seem like it
clarified that LEAVE-style phasers do not trip till after an exception is handled (and not resumed)
the implementation of take is specifically before unwinding even if implemented with a control exception
simplified series operator by moving generator function to the left side (any function on right side will now be a limiting conditional)
a * is no longer required to intuit the series on the left; the absence of generator before the ... operator is sufficient
first argument on the right of ... is now always a limiter argument
for convenience and consistency, added a new ...^ form to exclude a literal limiter from the generated series
unlike ranges, however, there is no leading exclusion ^... or ^...^
series is a list associative list infix, and each ... pays attention only the portion of the list immediately to its left (plus the limit from the right)
an "impossible" limit can terminate a monotonic intuited series even if the limit can never match exactly
variables now default to a type of Any, and must explicitly declare Mu or Junction type to hold junctions
this is to reduce pressure to duplicate many functions like == with Mu arguments; most of our failure values should be derived from Any in any case
a Mu result is more indicative of a major malfunction now, and is caught at first assignment to an Any variable
Instant/Duration types are biased away from Num and towards Rat/FatRat semantics
Instant is now completely opaque; we no longer pretend to be the same as TAI, numerically speaking
Instants are now considered a more basic type than epochs, which are just particular named instants
all culturally aware time can be based on calculations involving instants and durations
list associative operators now treat non-matching op names as non-associative rather than right-associative, forcing parens
Whatever semantics now autocurry any prefix, postfix, or infix operator that doesn't explicitly declare that it handles whateverness itself
WhateverCode objects now take a signature to keep clear how many args are not yet curried
so *+* is now more like WhateverCode:($x,$y)
autocurrying is still transitive so multiple ops can curry themselves around a *
added semilists as Slicel type to go with Parcel
this allows us to bind @array[1,2,3] differently from @array[1,2,3;4,5,6], for instance
the Matcher type now excludes Bool arguments to prevent accidental binding to outer $_ when closure is needed
when and ~~ will now warn of always/never matching on direct use of True or False names as matcher
STD generalizes \w lookahead to all twigils now
STD now treats non-matching list associatives as non-associative
things like 1 min 2 max 3 are now illegal, and require parenthesization for clarity
STD now treat invocant colon as just a comma variant so it does not fall afoul of the list associativity change
CORE now recognizes the TrigBase enumeration

Patrick:

first release of the new branch of Rakudo last week
passing ~25,000 tests at the release
thanks to optimizations from chromatic, Jonathan, and Vasily, Rakudo has a lot of speed improvements
in particular, it can run those tests in under 10 minutes, non-parallel, depending on your hardware
older releases took 25 minutes and more
the regex tests will slow things down
ultimately, we're seeing a big speed improvement over the past releases
cleaned up lists and slices, now they work pretty well
worked with Solomon Foster and others to speed up trig operations
fixed a bug related to lexicals declared in classes
fixed the long-standing and often recurring problem with curlies ending a line/statement causing the next statement to be a statement modifier
easy to fix in the new grammar
that was nice
made an initial implementation of the sort method
it's very short, because Parrot provides one
there are a few bugs in Rakudo there still, but I'll get them
planning for the Copenhagen hackathon on March 5 - 9
Jonathan and I have been updating the Rakudo roadmap
will check that in in the next couple of hours
so far, every time we review it, we surprise ourselves at how much we've accomplished
we're meeting all of the top priority goals without making any heroic efforts
we'll put those goals in as well as timelines
most of the major tasks from previous roadmaps have happened

Allison:

working on Python this week
attended Python VM summit, Python language summit, and PyCon
Parrot's on good track to support what Python needs
useful to make community connections
when I reviewed Pynie, I was surprised to see how close it is to supporting the whole Python syntax
some of those features are big, like objects
but we should support them soon
Debian packages delayed by the absence of a sponsor
they should go into Debian soon though
I put in a request for feature-freeze exception for Ubuntu 10.4
Parrot 2.0 should go in
haven't made any commits to the PCC branch
that'll be a top priority for next week

fixed a Parrot GC bug for last week's Rakudo release
made some optimizations in Rakudo and Parrot
helped Jonathan find a few more
fixed a long-standing math MMD bug
still working on HLL subclassing; more tricky than you think
may be some conflicting design goals about vtable overriding and MMD

Allison:

Patrick, do we need an explicit deprecation for old PGE and NQP?

Patrick:

I think Will already added one for NQP
we can add one for PGE if we need
they don't necessarily have to disappear at the next release
but no one's planning to maintain them

Allison:

no reason not to put in the notice now
we don't have to remove them at the earliest possible date

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 17 February 2010

chromatic — 2010-02-25T00:27:32+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 17 February 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

much work clarifying relationship of parcels to everything else (<a b>, assignment, arguments, captures, parameters, signatures, gather/take, and loop returns)
we now list all scope declarators in one spot
conjectured some ideas on how to handle the allomorphism of literals more dwimmily
had already specced some of this behavior for literals found inside qw angles.
literals that exceed a Rat64's denominator automatically keep the string form around for coercion to other types
clarified that anon declarator allows a name but simply doesn't install it in the symbol table
respecced the trig functions to use a pragma to imported fast curried functions
still uses enum second argument for the general case (rakudo is still stuck on slow strings there)
on iterators, renamed .getobj to .getarg since arguments are the typical positional/slicey usage
signatures are never bound against parcels anymore, only against captures
we now use "argument" as a technical term meaning either a real parcel or an object that can be used independent of context as an argument
anything that would stay discrete when bound to a positional, basically
return, take, and loop return objects are also arguments in that sense
they all return either a parcel or anything that can stand on its own as an argument
STD now adds a shortname alias on adverbialized names, ignores collisions on the shortname for now, which is okay for multis
STD now complains about longname (adverbialized) collisions
STD no longer carps about duplicate anonymous routine declarations
made the undeclared type message the same for parameters as for other declarations
clarify the error message about anonymous variables
no longer report a $) variable error where ) is the $*GOAL
add WHAT etc. to list of functions that require an argument

Allison:

working on two HLL implementations
one is Pynie, the other is Camle
nothing to do with Caml or ML
I've noticed huge improvements in NQP-rx from the previous NQP
can't say which feature improvements make the most difference, but I'll migrate Pynie pretty soon to take advantage of the new version
continuing to shepherd Debian and Ubuntu packages

Patrick:

essentially all I did was unify things
previously it had been two or three tools
it's just one

Allison:

even the syntax seems more regular

Patrick:

there are more pieces available in NQP-rx
Rakudo's -ng is now master
the old master is now -alpha
we took a big hit on spectests, but they seem to be coming back quickly
5000 tests pass on trunk now
we have 16k or 17k we haven't re-enabled; they make the spectest slower
Jonathan thinks we may pass 25,000 tests now
that's great, considering where we were a week ago
I redid Rakudo's container, value, and assignment module
previously variables held values directly
now they contain reference PMCs
that cleaned up many things
we use more PMCs, but now we don't clone and copy as much
we move references around more
seems closer to how Perl 6 handles things
was much easier than I expected
updated the NQP-rx regex engine and built in constant types
handles Unicode character names
reclaims plenty of tests
answered lots of questions for people adding things into Rakudo
prioritizing other people writing code over writing code
increases our developer pool; seems to be working well
new release of Rakudo planned for tomorrow
don't know how many tests we'll pass, but it should go well
plan to put in a few things like sort and grammars over the next week
then I'll review the RT queue to find bugs and (hopefully) closeable bugs

working on GC tuning
also working on String PMC tuning
working on built-in types and their behavior as classes and parent classes
the multidispatch bugs in particular I hope to solve