use Perl

I noticed a nice new Perl 5.8.0 perlintro. I am trying to train and inspire some absolute Perl beginners and started by pointing them at the URL above (while warning them *not* to visit the intro author's Kink album at infotrope.net ;)

Oh, and I just subscribed to perl-trainers@perl.org. Any advice on how to train Perl beginners welcome.

Dave Hoover (nick redsquirrel) and Jerome Quelin have done a fantastic job of running the recent TPR golf tournaments; see TPR01 for the most recent one.

Here are some statistics from the recent series of games:

fwp Santa........... 35 players on scoreboard
irc Christmas....... 11 players on scoreboard
fwp Get Even........ 51 players on scoreboard
TPR Base-36......... 82 players on scoreboard
TPR Secret Number...127 players on scoreboard

I'm amazed at the number of new golfers the TPR games are drawing!
All this recent golfing activity has led Stephen Turner and me to ponder: What is the history of Perl golf?

As far as I can tell, the term Perl Golf was coined by Greg Bacon here.

Here is an interesting post: Larry plays golf with himself in 1991.

If anyone has more information on the history of Perl golf, please let me know, as I am eager to write an article on it. In particular, I am interested to learn the first occurrence of an organised golf competition, similar to the TPR tournaments mentioned above.

Today I am putting the finishing touches on the golf course to be played on fwp@perl.org next week. The game starts Wednesday afternoon (USA time), evening (Europe), and runs for five days. So, if you enjoy a competitive round of golf, subscribe to fwp and join in the fun! You don't have to be an expert to play as there is a separate leaderboard for beginners.

Each player's solutions are kept secret. Only a daily leaderboard is known. Watching the thrust and parry between the leading pack of golfers can be quite entertaining at times. At the end of the game, all solutions are made public, and it is then amazing to behold the incredible variety of creative solutions found in the heat of battle.

The first fwp golf game, held around Christmas, was won by Eugene van der Pijll, the Flying Dutchman. Here are some references to that game:
game start
final leaderboard
game solutions

The companion ircnet Christmas game saw Eugene dethroned by Spiff, aka Karsten Sperling.

I take Perl Ascii Art seriously. No, really I do. I even wrote a CPAN module Acme::EyeDrops to help me.

I felt honoured because my first such post to london.pm was singled out for a special weirdest post of the week award. They may regret encouraging me, however, for today I posted perhaps the weirdest reply of the week :)

Anyway, enough of this time-wasting nonsense. I've got a golf course to prepare for next week's fwp@perl.org golf tournament.

I recently joined the ranks of CPAN authors, but have only written one module, namely Acme::EyeDrops. I have not received much feedback on it and only one bug report, making me curious to see if anyone was actually using it. Searching with good old google revealed, to my great surprise, that it is being taught at Harvard University! Well, I don't really know what practicalperl.com is -- part of Harvard Extension School, whatever that means. Anyway, here is their homework assignment.

Homework 2 problem 5

Just follow the instructions...
You will install Acme::Eyedrops.

You will write a program, eyedrops.pl, that uses Acme::Eyedrops
to convert a program into a prettier version of a program.

$ ./eyedrops.pl hello.pl > hello_world_eyedropped.pl
1 shapes completed.
$ perl hello_world_eyedropped.pl
Hello world!

Interestingly, the lecturer manually added use strict to the top of an EyeDrop'ed program, and, shock, horror, it worked! It never occurred to me to test EyeDrops under use strict. :)

Oh, and it got a mention at Purdue University too, in a talk by Dave Jacoby titled The Joy of Perl in an unfortunately titled section: Programmers on Crack. But since it is mentioned in the same breath as the maestro's Acme::Bleach and Coy, I will forgive the author for the unfortunate section name. :)

My first post. Wow!

Who is the World's best Perl golfer? I don't know, but Eugene van der Pijll and Karsten Sperling must be right up there.

In early December, I organised the Santa Claus Golf Apocalypse on the fwp@perl.org mailing list, which was fun and much more popular than I expected, drawing 35 entries. One pdcawley played superbly, only to be narrowly beaten by Eugene van der Pijll, the Flying Dutchman. BooK also played well.

This event was closely followed by a similar recovery tournament for those addicts finding it difficult to come down, hosted by the ircnet folks. See http://a108.bauhuette.haw-hamburg.de/golf/challenge.html for details. This time Eugene was dethroned by Spiff, aka Karsten Sperling.