use Perl

I was very surprised and disappointed to see that TPF does not have the money to fund all the usual 10,000 USD for this quarters grants. (Luckily Vienna.pm chipped in.)

The TPF has a way to receive funds but AFAIK it is hardly advertised. Besides, something that is always on throughout the year is not really a drive. Looking at the current status of this fund drive it seems that the Perl Development drive has just 10,000 USD.

So I'd like to first ask the people in TPF to provide an explanation what are those funds used for so we - the Perl community - can have a better understanding.

Then, I'd like to see a real fund drive similar to what Wikipedia does. It does not have to target 6,000,000 USD. TPF can target 100.000 USD or as a first round can even target 40,000 USD just to cover the costs of quarterly grants for 2009.

For this

1. TPF only needs to decide on it.
2. Either we use the Perl Development category on the TPF donation site or someone in TPF needs to setup a new category.
3. Someone (Alberto?) has to write down the list of achievements from the previous grants. At least for 4 quarters.
4. Someone has to create an image we can put on our web sites (Something that can show the progress of the funds and which can be easily noticed.
5. Site owners will have to put the image with the link on their site.

Personally I would be glad to put it on CPAN::Forum and a textual version on the Perl community adserver.
I am quite sure some of the bigger Perl related sites would be ready to do the same.

I would even volunteer to contact all the site maintainers personally and ask them to promote the fund drive.

If Alberto does not not have the time for it I can even create the list of achievements.

So can this be organized or are we too afraid of not getting enough funds?

read there: Plans for Integrating Padre with Parrot and Rakudo but comment here.

I have already tried to initiate several projects that need the support of TPF, some of them around getting more money for the activities of TPF such as the grants.

Every time I had to privately chat with one or more TPF officers.

Why is there no public mailing list of TPF with all of its officers subscribed where outsiders like me could start discussing possible projects (e.g. fund drive) and where everyone could see the issues that need to be resolved for such project to take off?

Why not provide a forum to people who would want to get involved some of the work you are doing?

Oh I think I have déjà vu I just don't have time to dig out my earlier posts about this.

Anyway, further ranting here

And the hard part with this is that I know at least some of the people in TPF personally and I think very highly of their work. At least the part I see outside of TPF. So why do I feel the urge to criticize them or TPF?

Students often ask me what modules are in standard perl that they can be sure will be on every machine they want to deploy their code.

The only answer I can give them is not care about that but to prepare for installing things.

Not only that the list of core modules is changing from version to version of perl releases but it also depends on the downstream distribution they use.

On many systems perldoc is in a separate package and does not come with the main perl package.

I just found out that Red Hat also separates CPAN.pm into its own package so their standard perl does not even include CPAN.pm

Ovid started a large thread about how Perl 5 is dying.
Instead of arguing if TIOBE measures it correctly or not or if you think Perl (in general, not just 5) is going down or if you think it is doing well, let's think about what to do in order to make it more popular?
If for nothing else so we can feel better that we are using something that is popular.

Lately I have been thinking that maybe the biggest issue of Perl is that it is not friendly enough to beginners. Especially Windows users. So I try to Make it friendlier to beginners, especially those using Windows.

That means for me, creating an IDE that will have

• Context sensitive help in the mother tounge of the developer
• A built in debugger
• Sample scripts
• Tool to build Moose based application
• Tool to build Catalyst based web application
• ...

I am sure some others will think that this is a good investment in the future of Perl. You are welcome to join us.

Others will think this is a total waste of time but something else is needed.

What do you do to undie Perl?

As usual, thanks for everyone who contributed!

Install using

pip  http://www.perlide.org/download/Padre-0.20.tar.gz

or from CPAN:

$ cpan
cpan> install Padre

Changes highlights

• Fix the super nasty "cannot save new file" bug
• French translation added
• All kinds of indentation and tab/space autodetection
• Restore inner window layout when restarted
• Can save file on Mac OS X as well...

Full list of Changes

Padre mailing list, irc information, bug and issue tracking on the Padre site as usual.

There is also a new version of Portable Strawberry Perl with Padre.

As usual I am glad to announce release 0.19 of Padre, the Perl IDE

Look at the Changes file.

Highlights

• Added Korean, Hungarian and Hebrew translations of the GUI to the already existing German and English
• Switching between languages is now immediate
• Beginning of better file encoding support
• Continuous Perl syntax checking is now available to every user

You can already fetch it from CPAN by typing

$cpan
cpan> install Padre

If something does not work well, look at the download page or ask us on IRC for help.

Regarding languages.

I'd like to go deeper and broader.

By broader I mean I'd like to have more translations. Actually there is a Chinese, a Spanish and a Dutch on the way. I just need to get the translators sign up on our web site so I can give them commit access.

One of our objectives is to make Perl more accessible to beginners. This means to eliminate the need to know English well. For that I'd like to have more translated versions of our GUI.

So if you think you'd like to help the beginners in your local language a bit, please consider translating the GUI of Padre.

By deeper I meant that I also would like to have translated versions of the Perl call-tips (simple description of the perl keywords) and one for the errors and warnings perl gives along with the localized version of diagnostics.

We plan to make this work independent from Padre so it can be reused by other tools as well.

So again, if you'd like to help this effort talk to us on our mailing list or on IRC #padre.

The above might sound like a lot of work but with our weekly release you can do a little at a time and see the improvement. That will bring in more people to help you.

It seems most of the Perl developers are using some Unix flavor (including Linux, *BSD and even Mac) so I might not get many responses. Still I'd like to have an idea What do you use Perl for on Windows?

In addition I'd like to know what is the single biggest thing you are missing from Perl on Windows?

As I was a vim user before I started to write Padre and I still keep filling up my files with :w and similar string, I was hoping to add vi-support to Padre.

Probably it would be better to just implement the things I need and then let others send either requests for further features or implement those by themselves but I use this opportunity to learn a bit more about vi. Maybe one day I become a power user of vi.

So after I implemented some of the most important features that I needed, now I am using the vi-mode of Padre to add some more keystrokes.

I started to go over the manual and I am already in chapter 3!

Out of about 100...

Lots of thanks to all the Padre developers, 0.18 was just released.

Right as your read this Padre 0.18 is getting to a CPAN near you.

For the inpatient you can use pip to install it: pip http://www.perlide.org/download/Padre-0.18.tar.gz Details for installation on the download page

See the Changes file.

Highlights

• The plug-in system has been changed. Hopefully making it more future proof. Your old plug-ins won't work. New versions will soon be released. Those who had Padre::Plugin::MY already on their system (came with 0.17) Have to remove that manually. (There are likely going to be two copies on your system)
• Plug-in manager dialog to enable/disable plug-ins
• Incremental, non-intrusive search a-la Firefox (#60).
• Drag and drop file(s) open them.
• Recognize when file is changed on disk improved.
• Jump to the last open window using menu or Ctrl-6 (#137)
• Pod2HTML improvements.
• Vi support factored out to a plug-in. (still shipping with Padre).

There is a plug-in in the work to provide Emacs support.

Enjoy and report any problems.