use Perl

jonasbn writes "Tuesday the 8th. of August, Copenhagen Perl Mongers are having a technical meeting at:

Sifira
Fredericiagade 16, 4.
1310 Kbh K

rizen writes "I'm proud to announce the formation of a new PM in Madison, Wisconsin, USA called the MadMongers, aka Madison Area Perl Mongers, aka Madison.pm. We're the only Perl Mongers group in Wisconsin, so if you're in Wisconsin, you should check us out.

"Kindly avoid inflicting upon this one the same fate shared by so much other documentation produced by a patchwork of well-meaning but disparate contributors seeing more the trees than the forest as they continually apply peephole optimizations that inadvertently compromise the overall integrity of the work, where the presentation eventually more resembles an illegible patchwork quilt of no especial application or intended purpose than it does a dedicated garment of one cloth woven." -- Tom Christiansen, at the height of his form.

dha writes "The Perl Foundation will again make its presence known in the vendor room of OSCON. If you would like to donate a couple of hours of your time to help run the booth, we'd be happy to have you! If you're interested, send an email to <volunteer@perlfoundation.org> We look forward to seeing you in Portland!"

Summary updates

Perl 6 Summary (March 2006)

A day or so ago I started seeing references to AJAX timelines, by Simile in a few blogs.

Thinking that they looked rather interesting, I've taken a couple of hours to integrate them in to SVN::Web.

The work's been carried out on this branch, if you want to follow along.

The code works well enough to draw a scrollable timeline of Subversion commits.

v6.pm now has rule declarations. It still needs some additional work to process parameters, etc. Then v6 will be able to compile it's own grammar, and maybe it will be entirely rewritten in P6 (except for the runtime modules).

Unfortunately, the build is currently broken in windows and osx - at least for unexperienced users, it seems. I'm planning to add eval() around the required binary modules, so that at least a subset of the language can work without XS compilation.

ajs writes "The Perl 6 development whirlwind that has seen the release of a new version of Pugs and the first release of v6.pm continues apace. The latest tidbit is audreyt's posting on the Pugs blog of the Perl 6 CPAN stack diagram along with some interesting commentary on how both Perl 5 and Perl 6 are expected to benefit from this."

Call for Participation

Please mark your calendars! The organizers of OSDC::Israel are glad to announce that the next conference will be held on 20-22 February 2007. There will be additional events such as tutorials and a Perl 6 hackathon near the main conference; the exact schedule will be announced in the next month or so.

At YAPC::NA, Alias challenged me to have a new release of Vanilla Perl and an alpha release of Strawberry Perl out on Thursday during the hackathon. Of course, when he said Thursday, he didn't realize that would be Thursday of this week. The installer can be downloaded from vanillaperl.com.

ehdonhon writes "On 23 September 2006 the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop will take place at Carnegie Mellon University. The idea is to have a low-cost, one-day conference on the theme of "Perl at Work":

            http://pghpw.org/

Although the call for talks has officially ended, we know that some excellent would-be speakers need just One More Day to get their proposals in. No problem: If you submit your proposal in next 48 hours, we will extend the deadline for you. Don't delay!

I'm declaring my YAPC::NA 2006 hackathon over. Perl::Dist (Perl::Dist::Builder), Perl::Dist::Vanilla and Perl::Dist::Strawberry are all submitted to CPAN, and checked in to Alias's subversion repository.

After quite a break for YAPC, house guests, and getting a new place, Perlcast is back with another great interview. This interview is with Andy Hunt of the The Pragmatic Programmers. In the interview Andy discusses some topics covered in the book "Practices of an Agile Developer".

• Interview Audio
• The Pragmatic Programmers

This is the Perl 6 Internals correction summary, for the weeks of 2006-02-13 through 2006-02-28, by Ann Barcomb.

Summary updates

Thank you to everyone who took the time to point out that I had accidently used February 2003 rather than 2006 for the internals section. This is the actual summary for February 2006.

Due to the comments received on short URLs, I have decided to use the originals, as I also prefer them.

jbisbee writes "I'd like to formally announce Perl-related news aggregation in #news on irc.perl.org. The channel has been up and running for a while, but after YAPC::NA 2006, I replaced all my code with Plagger and a YAML config file.

"CPAN is an unorganised anarchy. The checksum only guarantees that your downloaded file is identical to the one on CPAN, but there's no guarantee whatsoever that the file on CPAN is sane." -- Johan Vromans, reflecting upon the joys of open source software.

I've put on my overalls and rubber gloves to help Perl 6. I'm the chief Parrot Cage Cleaner, and I'd like you to join me in helping to keep this crucial bird healthy.

Parrot is the virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for interpreted languages. Parrot will be the target for the final Perl 6 compiler, and is already usable as a backend for Pugs, as well as variety of other languages.

The Parrot project was re-energized by a week-long hackathon at YAPC::NA 2006, with Parrot wizards from around the world converging on Chicago to create more magic. However, when wizards create magic, they spend less time fighting entropy. The Parrot project is starting to accumulate technical debt, and that helps diminish the potential velocity of the project. It often turns out that without janitors, the wizards get stuck.

It's that time again! If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it's worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org. Grant applications must be in by the last day of July and we will be awarding the grants at the beginning of September.

Starting with this update, Ann Barcomb will be writing the Perl 6 summaries. Her plan is to release new issues on Sundays, initially dealing with the backlog at a rate of one month per week, and eventually returning to posting a summary of the previous week on a weekly basis.

"But having it match what perl6 will do is even more important than having it make perfect sense, IMO.", Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes, thinking about forwards compatibility.