use Perl

Chris promises to make this a no-BS, no-bashing, honest look at the strengths and weaknesses of each of these languages. Come with an open mind and we'll explore the limitless frontiers of awesome programming.

Chris will be presenting both in the city and the suburbs this month:

• in Wheaton at IIT Rice campus on Feb 13, 2007
• in Chicago at Performics on Feb 27, 2007

Come on out and learn some new tricks!

I'm so proud. Two of my modules are in the 2006 Perl Advent Calendar:

http://perladvent.pm.org/2006/5/ ack
http://perladvent.pm.org/2006/6/ Module::Starter

Wednesday, December 6th is Wiki Hackathon day, at the home office of my employer, Socialtext.

Join us from remote or in our offices in Palo Alto to hack your Wiki project to your heart's content. We'll showcase all projects on this site and elsewhere, provide beer and pizza, and might even have some nifty giveaways for the day's coolest hacks. Virtual participants can join us in IRC channel #socialtext on irc.freenode.net. Visit the wikithon workspace at http://www.socialtext.net/wikithon.

ack is the replacement I wrote for grep, aimed at large trees of heterogeneous code.

Using it will change your life, but why? Here's my top 10 list:

1. Searches recursively through directories by default, while ignoring .svn, CVS and other VCS directories.
   • Which would you rather type?
     $ grep pattern $(find . | grep -v .svn)
     $ ack pattern
2. ack ignores most of the crap you don't want to search
   • VCS directories
   • blib, the Perl build directory
   • backup files like foo~
   • binary files
3. Lets you specify file types to search, as in --perl or --nohtml.
   • Which would you rather type?
     $ grep pattern $(find . -name '*.pl' -or -name '*.pm' -or -name '*.pod' | grep -v .svn)
     $ ack --perl pattern

   Note that ack's --perl also checks the shebang lines of files without suffixes, which the find command will not.

4. File-filtering capabilities usable without searching with ack -f. Want a list of all Perl files in a tree? Use ack -f --perl.
5. Color highlighting of search results.
6. Uses real Perl regular expressions, not a GNU subset.
7. Allows you to specify output using Perl's special variables
   • Example: ack '(Mr|Mr?s). (Smith|Jones)' --output='$&'
8. Many command-line switches are the same as in GNU grep:
   -w does word-only searching
   -c shows counts per file of matches
   -l gives the filename instead of matching lines
   etc.
9. ack is pure Perl, so consistent across all platforms.
10. Command name is 25% shorter. :-) Heck, it's 50% shorter compared to grep -r.

To install it, install the Perl module App::Ack. Your coding life will never be the same.

Visit the home page at http://petdance.com/ack

andy@mel[~/src/st/trunk]$ ack -w 'XXX|REVIEW|FIXME' -o | sort | uniq -c
  37 FIXME
180 REVIEW
674 XXX

What, you don't know what ack is? Get to http://petdance.com/ack and install it now. Even better, just do this:

sudo cpan App::Ack

If you don't know why $& is bad, see the docs for Devel::SawAmpersand. http://search.cpan.org/dist/Devel-SawAmpersand/

On Saturday, Krugle will be hosting a demo of Krugle, as well as feeding us pizza. They're looking for content advisors, feature feedback, and other interesting ideas. If you're interested, plan on stopping in the main meeting room. If you're not, just come by, grab some pizza, and head back to hacking.

Ken Krugler, the founder, will be hosting the demo and conversation. He first cut his coding teeth in the Lisa/Mac vortex, and then spent 15 years solving I18N problems. For the past 18 months he's been obsessing about exploratory vertical search for code. In his spare time, he fiddles with cellular automata.

Until Gisle puts it in there for us, I've added one to WWW::Mechanize 1.21_01, which I just put up on CPAN.

http://code.google.com/p/html-tidy/ is the project home page. We have a mailing list set up there, and the Subversion repository is hosted at Google as well.