use Perl

The results and final report of the "Plat_Forms" international programming contest were released yesterday in a press conference in Nuremberg, and will be published today June 20th, 2007 on http://www.plat-forms.org/. For each of the categories Perl, PHP and Java, three teams of three people each competed to produce a comprehensive "social networking" application in just 30 hours.

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.4.13 "Clifton." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

At the Nordic Perl Workshop 2007 brian d foy presented on learning Perl 6. You can get the slides for that presentation and also listen to the audio podcast. In the presentation, brian talks about Pugs and encourages you to try it out. Just a note, the binary versions will save you a few days of compilation.

rGeoffrey writes "Going to YAPC::America in Houston, OSCON in Portland, or YAPC::Europe in Vienna this conference season? Do you want one third of your "15 minutes of fame"? Then give a Lightning Talk on some topic that speaks to you. Submissions now being accepted for Houston, Portland, and Vienna. Or go wild and crazy and try for 5 minutes at each of the three and get all 15 minutes in one ten week span."

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 13 June 2007. Larry, Damian, Patrick, Jesse, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.

Qiang writes "PerlChina is organizing a workshop in Beijing on sunday, June 17, 2007. The workshop is free for all. Registration is not mandatory, but please register youself if you are going to attend.

kmccombs writes "June's MadMongers meeting features a series of four lightning talks, three of which are to be presented by Plain Black staffers. These talks will pack a large amount of knowledge condensed into one session, so be prepared to take notes and walk out with some new ideas.

For the latest Perlcast, Jonathan Rockway and I talked with Matt Trout about DBIx::Class and the Perl ORM landscape.

jfluhmann writes "YAPC::NA 2007 is only 15 days away! If you haven't already registered, it's not too late! Visit the YAPC::NA website to get registered. Don't miss out on the largest Perl gathering of North America!

dha writes "The Perl Foundation will again make its presence known in the vendor room of OSCON in late July. 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!"

Allison writes "In a June 6th meeting of the board, the Open Source Initiative has approved the Artistic License 2.0 for their online list of licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition. The new version of the license will replace the original Artistic License and the Clarified Artistic License. Though the revision process for the Artistic 2.0 was completed nearly a year ago, this marks a significant vote of acceptance for the license from the broader open source community."

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 30 May 2007. Larry, Allison, and chromatic attended. These are the notes.

The Perl 6 design team met on 06 June 2007. Larry, Allison, Nicholas, Jesse, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.

The slides from last weekend's Teach-In are are now available online.

You can also get audio and video of the first session on both Blip.tv and Google video. There's also an RSS feed that you can subscribe to if you want to know when the remaining three sessions are released (over the next couple of weeks). I'm told that this feeds links to "enhanced podcasts" of the presentation - but not being an iGeek I have no idea what that means.

Thanks to Jonathan Tweed at the BBC for the work he is putting in on these recordings.

It's that time of year again--we need your bids in to host YAPC::NA in your town next summer. Most of the details for a bid are in my post from last year. Same rules apply this year.

To re-iterate a few points:

• If you plan on bidding, folks from your group should really attend YAPC::NA this year to see how things work and maybe even help out.
  
• Get your bid ready early and we'll give you feedback before the due date at the YAPC BOF.
• Venue requirements are available and bids from previous years are available in the TPF Blog. Last year all of the bids were very good, so they are a good resource.
• Details on running a YAPC are available in the TPF project on Google code.
• As with previous years, the bids will be made public in the TPF Blog after the due date.

Send any questions and completed bids to the TPF conferences group: tpf-conferences (at) perl (dot) org

After a very long break, Perlcast is back in action. I have quite a few podcasts in the queue, most from the Nordic Perl Workshop 2007. Let's get the first NPW interview out the door with this one with Curtis "Ovid" Poe concerning his work with Perl testing and TAP::Parser.

The latest development version of File::Path (version 1.99_02) is winging its way around the world to a CPAN mirror near you. It needs to be tested on as wide a variety of platforms as possible. This includes Windows, VMS, OS/2, QNX, NFS file systems, AFS and anything else you can lay your hands on.

Proposal Submission Deadline: Sunday, 27th May 2007, 23:59 (CET)

Just a quick note to let you all know that the deadline for submitting talk proposals for this year's YAPC::Europe is rapidly approaching.

For some ideas on talks and last-minute discussions see our wiki.

More information on how to submit a talk can be found on our website.

Speakers do not have to pay the attendance fee, and will receive some special goodies!

If you never did a talk (at a YAPC, or in general), we strongly encourage you to give it a try! The organisers will try to help newcomers with their talks, e.g. by proofreading the presentations.

We're waiting for your proposals!

bfree writes "Graphcomp posts new OpenGL benchmarks comparing:
Perl vs Python and SDL::OpenGL vs POGL
on their POGL Developer's Site

• Perl OpenGL (POGL) is over 20% faster than Python OpenGL (PyOpenGL)
• POGL is over 60% faster than SDL::OpenGL, using OpenGL::Array (OGA) objects
• POGL is comparable to C for many OpenGL operations

"

chromatic writes "On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.4.12 "Of the Caribbean." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 0.4.12 can be obtained via CPAN (soon), or follow the download instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion or SVK on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

The next release will take place on 19 June 2007.

Parrot 0.4.12 News:

• even more refactorings and improvements in configuration system
• improved tests and documentation for configuration system — Languages:
• Updated abc, PHP ("Plumhead"), Lua, Tcl
• Reclaimed Lisp — Design:
• new PMC PDD draft partially completed — Implementation:
• continued implementation of PDD 15 (Objects)
• minor garbage collector and memory management improvements
• several memory leaks resolved
• extended support for compilers other than GCC
• improved C++ compiler compatibility
• enhanced support for Solaris, non-MSVC Win32, and other platforms

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project.

Enjoy!"