Slashdot Mirror

perldoc.perl.org

use Perl; comes high on the list, along with PerlMonks and PerlBuzz.

Perl.org in general gets points for being where you can find Use, perldoc, and more.

Agreed. I'd also add Perlmonks.org; it's not documentation per se but it's damn useful.

For java, you have to master the API...Even modules that other people write are often documented with javadoc, and look just the same. Once you use it for a while it becomes familiar.

This exact sort of system has been in place for years at PerlMonks, to excellent effect. These guys just took it and applied it to programming questions in general.

I admit, it's been a few years, but you seem to have hit one of the major issues I have with Brainbench.

(and I'm only _not_ certified any more as they expire your certs out in 3 years, and I didn't feel like re-taking the ones that weren't required for my job ... but I have a stack of certificates with gold foil seals on them stating I was once certified in a bunch of stuff)

If only there was somewhere to rate CPAN packages...

Also, there are comp.lang.perl.misc and comp.lang.perl.moderated for Usenet, PerlMonks, Use Perl;, Perl.com, and many IRC channels, books, and mailing lists.

There are specific threads on Perlmonks about how to make it easier to choose which object-relational mapper, which text templating system, which web application framework, which object system, which date and time modules, and which modules for any given task.

Anything you want to do has two or three more popular, better documented ways with more community support and a host of other ways just in case. The community does a very good job of recommending one or two over the others.

You seem to be unfamiliar with the work of Damien Conway, Randal Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and Lincoln Stein.

Stop by Perlmonks to read some book reviews and maybe lurk the Seekers of Perl Wisdom or Meditations sections. You'll see that what you've been reading is not representative of how things actually get done.

There are Perl Poetry and Obfuscation sections on the Perlmonks site, but those are games. You'll notice that there's a clear division between neat tricks for the sake of neat tricks and maintainable code for the sake of maintainable code.

You hit the nail right on the head.

In my Post on Perlmonks I point this out as well.

I think that if there were some more support behind an end-to-end Perl development stack we would see more respect for Perl from "Corporates."

If you're giving the situation of trying to deal with older code, I'd also recommend Perl Medic: Transforming Legacy Code by Peter J. Scott. It has advice for dealing with existing code of questionable quality, rather than the case of writing good code from the beginning. (in the case of dealing with existing code, I'd actually recommend it before Higher Order Perl and possibly Perl Best Practices -- I've never read the other two you mentioned, so can't gauge their relative usefulness).

Another book that might be useful is Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook by Ian Langworth and chromatic, so that you can write better test suites to determine what you're breaking as you update the code.

Hear hear! I still can't understand why Perl is downplayed as a language. It has a great set of builtin functions, an incredible community (see CPAN and Perl Monks), can be written in a style that looks and functions exactly like C, and above all, its performance is pretty good.

As noted, it can be used as C on steroids: built-in automatically growing/shrinking arrays, hashes (dictionaries to some), and completely automatic garbage collection. The syntax, being eminently flexible, can be made to look damn similar to C's.

Beyond that, it gives you much more expressive power. In my opinion, in some situations it can be much more meaningful to say something like return unless $t > 0 versus the equivalent if (!($t > 0)) { return; }. Subtle things like that allow code to flow much more freely, and that's barely even scratching the surface.

Perl gives you room to grow well beyond C (without requiring it, of course). Functional programming techniques abound since Perl's array data structure works equally well as a Lisp-like list. It has builtins such as map and grep and a standard bundled module that provides reduce, so virtually any functional programming task can be implemented easily.

With everything it's got going for it, sometimes I'm left scratching my head as to why it's not used more widely. A couple of bad programmers write line noise and suddenly the whole reputation of the language is at stake. A sad thing indeed.

They're really cool when done using gradients.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram

Code for generating them...
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=190245

Example...
http://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~chultqui/houdini/images/heightfield_voronoi_part.png

I was thinking about that problem the other day. The Rock Band set is a normal USB HID device, and I wrote a program a while back to play sounds on a normal computer when the pads are hit (link for the interested). Presumably, the GH kit will also be a USB HID device, so if they're not compatible, then it should be possible to easily create an adapter using an AVR USB device that translates codes between the games. For that matter, it should be possible to do the same for guitars.

I agree, community is vital to the success of a programming language. Some languages, C for instance, have uninviting but huge communities. You won't be hard pressed to find someone who knows the answer to a run of the mill question in C. You may have some trouble getting an answer other than RTFM, though.

However, a friendly, helpful, and well-established community is not a sufficient condition for the success of a language. Take Perl as an example. Perl Monks is one of the most welcoming and helpful communities I've ever seen on the internet, period. Literally nothing compares regardless of field. And furthermore, they'll answer the full gamut of questions, ranging from utter newbie to relatively advanced functional programming and beyond.

Let's not forget CPAN, which is probably the largest and best organised collection of packages and libraries for any programming language on the internet. Yes, there is a little noise you have to wade through, but the signal to noise ratio is unbelievably high. If you want to do something in Perl, it's likely that you can find a module on CPAN that will at least give you a base of code to work with, if not a completely working and tested solution.

You'll note that despite those two great features, Perl continues to lose popularity, mostly to Python. It's probably due to the fact that, even though Perl is pretty easy to get started with, as you note Python is down right trivial. People call it pseudocode that you run because it's so damn simple and easy to get going, which is probably one of its greatest strengths. Perl has been around longer, probably has a larger and friendlier community, yet the outright ease with which one can program in Python trumps those other, greater (in my opinion) strengths of Perl.

It's sad to see such a great language get knocked all the time due to a bad reputation (which it certainly deserved--five to ten years ago). Unfortunately, a combination of a bad rep and an easier to use, more popular language is starting to make it look like Perl will soon be relegated to a relative niche, at least in the eyes of the public.

In the case of Perl (the language) and perl (the language system's implementation), there's The Perl Foundation. They pay bounties, give grants for certain projects, help support sites like Perlmonks and use Perl;, and more.

The tcpdump and libpcap projects are on SourceForge, but they don't have their donations link enabled. The projects' home page isn't coming up for me ATM, so I can't say if they have anything there.

The strace project is also on SourceForge and also does not have their donations enabled. The web page listed for the project is the project's SourceForge page itself, so I don't know where else to look off the top of my head.

Not sure about rpm/yum, but the Debian package system is mostly written in perl. It's still an interpreted language, and it just depends what you're using it for whether it'll be faster.

For a package manager, specifically, it sounds like Perl is a better choice

, but it's not a clear winner in all categories vs. Java.

I'm not a huge fan of Java, but I think it has its place.

Comments on the Cox paper from the Haskell regex implementer. Another response, from the Perl side.

Wrong, Perl parses and byte-compiles the whole program on startup,

sub ouroboros { shift->(@_) }
ouroboros sub { shift->(@_) }

Don't you know: Only perl can parse Perl. I has been mathematically proven: http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393

Close all the tabs except one, go to about:blank (or whatever firefox calls it).

Notice how the memory use doesnt go down?

These are pretty much textbook definitions of memory leaking, firefox is consuming memory when it needs it, but then not giving the memory back when its done.

No, these are pretty much textbook definitions of normal memory usage:

It is impossible to tell whether a block of memory has been freed just by looking at it. You must keep track of that yourself. An additional point is that malloc does not normally return the freed memory to the operating system; it remains owned by the process until it terminates. The process can reuse it the next time it requests more memory, but other programs will not have access to it, even if no other memory is available. As a corollary, then, the memory footprint of a program is the size of the largest allocation(s) made at any one time. Thus it is always wise to free objects you do not need, especially large ones as soon as possible, to minimize this footprint.

In addition, according to perlmonks.com (and apparently perldoc -q "program shrinks"):

You can't. On most operating systems, memory allocated to a program can never be returned to the system. That's why long-running programs sometimes re-exec themselves. Some operating systems (notably, FreeBSD and Linux) allegedly reclaim large chunks of memory that is no longer used, but it doesn't appear to happen with Perl (yet). The Mac appears to be the only platform that will reliably (albeit, slowly) return memory to the OS.

Obviously this last quote was about Perl, but being written in C and relying on C's malloc and free, it'll have the same memory issues.

Let me post a better reply: for those who don't get the joke, paco was a one shot post over on perlmonks. The post gained a lot of publicity over time, and perl monks all over await the return of paco.

"Completely incorrect. Of course Python does have the GIL which means they're only good for blocking on I/O and not actual parallel computation. And neither Jython nor IronPython have the GIL."

Well the guys at #python told me that Python uses green/userspace threads.

It's good that Jython/IronPython don't have a GIL but are they production-ready? They're kinda useless for most existing Python apps until they can run those apps perfectly fine. Last time I checked, someone said that they don't implement the entire CPython standard library.

"Perl also has threading support (and no GIL) and no, it does not copy the entire interpreter state, and hasn't done so since perl 5.6 at least."

Really? Then can you explain why:
- My 78000 lines Perl program takes 15 seconds to create a thread? On top of that, it crashes right after thread creation.
- Every single documentation on the Internet about Perl threads seem to suggest that they're heavyweight. I quote: "Perl ithreads are not lightweight!"
- The official Perl threading documentation says that variables are, by default, not shared between threads unless you explicitly mark them as shared.

I've killed some time on this since it's a pretty interesting idea. It turns out there are plenty outside the D and F range. It does seem to like pages with a single Flash object and not much else, so that's bad. It also makes some pretty arbitrary decisions which don't mean squat to many sites. There are some sites that get enough traffic that speed is a factor but not so much that a content delivery network is really necessary, for example.

I skipped the actual link and score on sites that are pretty much just representative of the sites around them. I wanted to include them by name, though, to show where they fall. I've stuck mostly to main index pages, and I've noted where I've gone deeper.

A: Google (99%), Altavista main page (98%), Altavista Babelfish (90%) (including upon doing a translation from English to French), Craigslist (96%), Pricewatch (93%), Slackware Linux, OpenBSD, Led Zeppelin site at Atlantic (100%), supremecommander.com, w3m web browser site (96%)

B: Apache.org (87%), the lighttpd web server (84%), Google Maps, which also got a C once (84% in most cases), Perlmonks (84%), Dragonfly BSD (85%), Butthole Surfers band page (81%), 37 Signals

C: One Laptop Per Child,, ESR's homepage, the Open Source Initiative (78%), Google News (73%), Lucid CMS (74%), Perl.org (75%), lucasfilm.com, Charred Dirt game

D: gnu.org, The Register, A9 (66%), kernel.org, Akamai (64%), kuro5hin.org, freshmeat.net, linuxcd.org, Movable Type (61%), Postnuke, blogster.com, Joel on Software (67%), Fog Creek Software, metallica.com, gaspowered.com, Scorched 3D (68%), id software (64%), ISBN.nu book search

F: MS IIS (49%), microsoft.com, msn.com, linux.com, fsf.org, discovery.com, newegg.com, rackspace.com, the Simtel archive (26%), CNet Download (29%), Adobe (58%), savvis.com, mtv.com, sun.com, pclinuxos.com, freebsd.org, phpnuke.org, use.perl.org, ruby-lang.org, python.org, java.com, Rolling Stones band page (56%), powellsbooks.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, getfirefox.com

My site for my company (96%) gets an A (no, I'm not going to get it slashdotted) which is pretty simple but has a pic and some Javascript on it. Several sites I have done or have helped design with someone else get C or D ratings.

Remember the Catalyst debacle a while back?

It's questions just like the one posted here on slashdot that made me question why that whole process was kept secret. If every project deals with conflicts in a secretive fashion, how can anyone else benefit when they have to deal with problems of their own?

Here's a slightly pared down version of my Perlmonks post:

... why is it that when the going gets rough, core principles of the whole movement are abandoned? Open source, open discussion, open participation and contribution, learning from each other, whether it's our successes or failures. This suddenly turns into conditional agreements of absolute silence, closed mediations, secrecy, and barely explained personnel changes. The pithy voice in my head is trying to remember whether it's the white smoke or the black smoke that lets us know about the change.

I can read between the lines like anyone else, but who can deny that some of the best, most enlightening discussions here on PerlMonks have been heated. Someone feels strongly about something and they end up providing great detail about their reasons. Regardless if you agree, you've probably learned something.

Catalyst has become a very significant project. Aren't we missing the benefit of how such a project is lead? Wouldn't we benefit from the technical details such as how changes impact other projects? Wouldn't we also benefit from seeing other's passion for their projects? At minimum, maybe it would expand our awareness of the community as a whole.

Remember the Catalyst debacle a while back?

It's questions just like the one posted here on slashdot that made me question why that whole process was kept secret. If every project deals with conflicts in a secretive fashion, how can anyone else benefit when they have to deal with problems of their own?

Here's a slightly pared down version of my Perlmonks post:

... why is it that when the going gets rough, core principles of the whole movement are abandoned? Open source, open discussion, open participation and contribution, learning from each other, whether it's our successes or failures. This suddenly turns into conditional agreements of absolute silence, closed mediations, secrecy, and barely explained personnel changes. The pithy voice in my head is trying to remember whether it's the white smoke or the black smoke that lets us know about the change.

I can read between the lines like anyone else, but who can deny that some of the best, most enlightening discussions here on PerlMonks have been heated. Someone feels strongly about something and they end up providing great detail about their reasons. Regardless if you agree, you've probably learned something.

Catalyst has become a very significant project. Aren't we missing the benefit of how such a project is lead? Wouldn't we benefit from the technical details such as how changes impact other projects? Wouldn't we also benefit from seeing other's passion for their projects? At minimum, maybe it would expand our awareness of the community as a whole.

The article linked in the New York Times correctly uses fewer and not less. Corruption must have occured.

I completely forgot what I was going to post. So I'll say something else. About how Perl programmers would disagree with you.

Larry Wall's Perl is a fantastic language, because as a linguist he tried to emulate the versility of natural languages. Perl includes pronouns (it, them) and the same characters can be used for different functions, depending on context. He wanted to travel to a remote people without writing and help them create a system, but couldn't afford to, so blessed us by creating Perl. Thank you. See http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html

I've forgotten again. Shit. Sorry. Matt

Oh yeah. Making a program language more natural isn't about using more English words and fewer punctuation characters - *cough* to the languages that want you to write number.arithmetic.multiply - a ridiculous construction, but by helping the user achieve a similar command (if not comfort) we have with out natural languages. Greater writers are never confined by their language, they play with it, tease it, and often ignore all convention to create their masterpieces. What programming languages can boast poetry?
http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node=Perl%20Poet ry

In the US, anything you create at work is likely owned by your employer; either because state law or an intellectual property agreement you probably signed when you were hired. Anything you do on your own time while not at work may also be owned by your employer, depending on what that agreement you signed says, whether you're an hourly employee, the laws of your state, and the phase of the moon.

I suggest you (and everyone who creates anything as part of their job) read this . A prominent member of a Perl discussion site was informed by his employer that they owned every piece of code he had written since he started employment with them, including contributions to several open source projects. And they did.

"I believe that many people will be doing lots of 'natural experiments' with collective intelligence in the next few years -- with or without us,"

Apart from a google search for "PHP sucks", here's a few I have bookmarked:

1. Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites - PHP suffers from "oversimplification leading to excessive complexity".
2. What I don't like about PHP - a general shopping list of complaints.
3. "PHP IN CONTRAST TO PERL" - How PHP is a mess and Perl does more with less.
4. List of PHP's shortcomings from perl.advocacy
5. Re^2: Is Perl a good career move? on PerlMonks

I kid, I kid. There was recent ruckus about whether or not 'Perl is dying' on Perlmonks. Both languages are quite viable. Let's not start that whole ugly discussion agin. Please. Take my wife.

http://www.perlmonks.org/ - this is The perl community forum. Recently it seems a bit crowded there - but it is still the forum where I would go to get help on general Perl matters. Mailing lists and IRC are good for more specific questions related to some particular library.

This perl script. (Or google for "wherehot.pl")

It's a relatively simple script I wrote a while back to filter hprof textual output. It tells you things like "which of the code inside com.foo.* is being slow"? And "which of the code inside com.foo.* is causing StringBufffer.expandCapacity to be invoked, and thereby being slow?".

A further enhancement of it (that I haven't posted yet, sorry) changes the output format to look something like a java stack trace, which means you can take the output of that script, copy and paste it into eclipse's Java Stack Trace console, and be able to click on the lines identified as being slow.

We've found it to be a nice complement to graphical tools that let you visualize what bits are slow, like HPJmeter.

`... I tried to add that some people believed that Bomis is in fact not "glamour photography" but "pornography", and found myself accused of vandalism and given the boot. ...`[1]

I saw this doing a quick check on the history of Bomis. Here is the reference to the changes [2].

There are real problems in the way wikipedia allow rewrites on articles. Wikipedia itself doesn`t take any responsibility for inaccuracies, when there are technical measures that could be implemented to do this. Wikipedia does not identify who makes the changes. Making it difficult to verify if a change was malicious or valid.

It would not be difficult for users to gain XP [3] through group validated approvals to information, like in perlmonks. [4]

Btw if you think your having problems, check wikipedia-watch.org. [5]

Reference
[1] slashdot, `William Randolph Hearst - not forgotten`:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171739&cid=143 04794
[Accessed Wednesday, 21 December 2005]

[2] wikipedia, `bomis edit history`:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bomis&ac tion=history
[Accessed Wednesday, 21 December 2005]

[3] XP or experience points are gained by group validation of posts. They are rewarded for good or acceptable behaviour and removed for the converse.

[4] perlmonks, `Perlmonks is a place where you can discuss Perl intelligently. Users start off as novices and work their way to Master gaining experience points gained through intelligent posts, articles etc.`:
http://www.perlmonks.org/
[Accessed Wednesday, 21 December 2005]

[5] wikipedia watch, `We are interested in them because they have a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information.`:
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/
[Accessed Wednesday, 21 December 2005]

The freedom of the language has nothing to do with its syntactic cleanliness. I don't know what makes you say Python dictates how you express yourself.

What about Perl Poetry? Or JAPH's? Here's a really good JAPH example: Latent JAPH. Obviously Python's forced tabs do indeed restrict expression.

The freedom of the language has nothing to do with its syntactic cleanliness. I don't know what makes you say Python dictates how you express yourself.

What about Perl Poetry? Or JAPH's? Here's a really good JAPH example: Latent JAPH. Obviously Python's forced tabs do indeed restrict expression.

Perl is a fable, about a monastery

I also have a two headed machine at work -- very handy (just wrote about this recently on Perlmonks). Here's how I have my system set up using Windowmaker:

1. Mail (mutt) IM (Gaim)
2. Nagios, company wiki (Firefox), qstat (local ssh), various xloads on my Production servers
3. Browser open to various Production servers (Firefox), sometimes logins (ssh)
4. Browser open to development machine (Firefox), logins to development machine (ssh)
5. Spare
6. Spare
7. Spare
8. Sometimes an additional browser
9. Browser open to GMail, Slashdot, Perlmonks, Groklaw, Google news

Anytime during the day I can go directly to the screen I want with a keystroke -- none of this peering at a little group of boxes and trying to click on it with the mouse. And I have to say the dual-headed thing is dynamite .. I'd much rather have two 19" screens than one monster screen. It just works.

But Acme::Bleach and Acme::Eyedrops can at least make it a pain in the ass to work out what it's doing.

However it could be copied verbatim and it would still work.

As with all other things perl, see CPAN and perlmonks for more information.

- Paul

There are people selling such things for Perl, the first to spring to mind is perl-obfus carried upon Freshmeat.

That is slated pretty thoroughly over at Perl Monks.

I wonder how many people have paid for this .. umm .. fine product?

This is such a frequently asked question that there's even a faq in the documentation that is distributed in almost every single perl distribution.

perldoc -q 'hide the source'

If that's not simple enough, then see the thread on perlmonks.org about it.

If you still think that obfuscating the source code is going to gain your company anything, then I doubt anyone really wants to see your code at all. (You don't happen to work for Blackboard, do you?)

*good* Perl programming is just as good a start as anywhere else. Send 'em to Perlmonks and leave'em to it.

Ticketmaster basically wrote Template Toolkit. And of course, their web site sucks ass. Obvious really. Whenever i hear the Perl trolls, I just remember Paul Graham's quote about Viaweb (Yahoo! shops):

"During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried."

Learning LISP is on my list. It's weird. But LISP is the latin of programming. Learn that and everything will fall into place.

Fucking Perl trolls.

I'd also recommend MJD's Higher Order Perl if you want to go even deeper.

http://www.perlmonks.org

Can't start early enough...

I encourage you to review every article I've written there, and come to your own conclusion. I'll stand by my public record.

I would say their is an art to programming. And that good programming is as much art as it is science. But it's a lot like asking if mathematics is art? We do have things like Perl Poetry and Literate Programming.

Other than that I think this is yet another stupid question.

Well if humor is art then this old Unix sex joke is art: # unzip ; strip ; touch ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; umount ; sleep

If coders *only* do what they must to get the job done, then how do you explain Perl poetry, for example? What about Perl golf?

How about things like quines, or programs that are valid and working programs in more than one language at once?

Aren't these things art? If not, why not? A programming language is, per se, just a tool - just like a brush. You can use brushes to simply coat things with paint, and there are many people who do just that for a living; but you can also use them to create art. The same goes for programming languages, doesn't it?

They're not new, they've been lording over us for some time...
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=294798

There was a similar discussion two weeks ago on Perl Monks: Code Samples and Previous Employers

(Although in that case, it was when an interviewer pushed him to violate his NDA)

Well, at least some of them.

• use Perl; is a good place, but very informal and tends to get sidetracked into politics :)
• Your local Perl mongers group may be a great place
• YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) and the Perl conference (now part of the Open Source conference) usually have many good presentations by the truly great Perl programmers
• I have the impression that Perlmonks is pretty good, though I don't tend to use it much
• Finally, the Perl5 Porters mailing list is the real original heart of the Perl community, though I think nowadays many of those guys have moved onto Perl6 work

A list of names is also useful: material by Damian Conway, Larry Wall, Randal Schwartz, Mark Jason Dominus, Simon Cozens (Perl involvement now minimal due to career change), and persons associated with them is going to be top notch. Plug their names into Google and see what they have to say. Catch a presentation or read a book by one of them if you can. Meanwhile, there is truly a lot of junk out there. There's an article out there somewhere about "how to tell a good Perl book from a bad Perl book," which I thought was by Mark Jason Dominus, but I can't seem to find it at the moment.

Finally, 90% of the useful modules you'll see recommended for use from CPAN are written by the intelligent lights in the Perl community. The time-tested modules that are now standard solutions are those that were written with high quality by good programmers.

For anyone getting into perl I can not recomend The Perl Monks Monastery enough. Lurk for a while, use super search to find the answers to almost any perl question you may have and if all else fails post to Seakers Of Perl Wisdom and enlightenment shall surely follow.

Randal is a regular contributor there and many of the other leading lights of perl pop up frequently.

Regards,
A monk.