Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

2018 Advent Calendars Launched for Computer Programmers and Web Geeks (24ways.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the night-before-geek-mas dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Saturday the Perl Advent Calendar entered its 19th year by describing how the Wise Old Elf used a Calendar::List module from CPAN to update his Elven Perl Monger website with all the dates for 2019. ("It is a well known fact that all of Santa's Elves are enthusiastic Perl Developers in their free time, contributing regularly to many of the amazing Perl projects we've come to know and love...")

But meanwhile, the Perl 6 Advent Calendar was describing how Santa gets data into the North Pole's CRM by defining a grammar unit which can be parsed using a built-in method (to trim out children's signatures) -- only to be chastised by his IT elf for failing to document his solution using Perl 6's built in markup language.

And 24Ways.org is also presenting its 14th annual "advent calendar for web geeks," a nicely-formatted offering that promises "a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring you all a little Christmas cheer."

Meanwhile, the Go language site Gopher Academy launched their 6th annual advent calendar, describing how to split data with content-defined chunking.

Jose Valim, creator of the Elixir programming language, has also announced the fourth annual "Advent of Code," an ongoing story that presents "a series of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels in any programming language you like." (The folks behind the Nim programming language are even organizing their own leaderboard at Nim-lang.org.)

And even QEMU, a free and open-source emulator performing hardware virtualization, is getting into the act with a QEMU advent calendar offering "an amazing QEMU disk image" each day through December 24th.
Feel free to leave a comment with your own reactions -- or with the URL for your own favorite online geek advent calendars...

39 comments

  1. Perl! by DevNull127 · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's great to see the Perl advent calendar tradition continuing for a full 19 years. There aren't many geek traditions that go back that far.

    And it's also nice to see that it's spread over the years into other programming communities.

    1. Re:Perl! by quenda · · Score: 0

      Too bad this is offending to me that I'm not a Christian but a moderate Muslim. Sincerely, I hope all these projects start embracing new COCs and stop many of us from contributing at once. The future of Open Source depends on us.

      Can't tell if Coward is serious or satire.

      There are not a lot of Christians in the Open Source community. Larry Wall is the only notable example I am aware of.

      We do of course occasionally pray to Saint IGNUcius, but like Moses and Jesus, I'm sure he is recognised as a prophet by the Shia and Sunni clerics.

      WTF is it with Muslims feeling excluded by Christmas? They believe in Jesus more than I do. ( I'm not 100% sure he wasn't made up as a composite character by St. Paul.)

    2. Re: Perl! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fuck you Christian, you don't deserve the fruits of Muslim work in Open Source

    3. Re:Perl! by helpfulcorn · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm a Muslim and I celebrate Christmas, as do many Muslims I know, both Sunni and Shia (most Shia I know are Lebanese and AFAIK they all have Christmas trees, or at the very least Christmas lights, some even in their offices). Yes, Muslims believe in Jesus, but especially in the western world that's not even a requirement, plenty of atheists, Jews, and so on also have Christmas trees and their children get visits from Santa. I'm pretty positive AC was just being satirical, but these days... Poe's law and all... Plus also something-something about if you don't like the code, don't run it, or some shit.

      I've seen online, but never met in person, a handful anti-Christmas Muslims, not because they don't believe in Jesus, but they have an idea of "Muslims should have a culture of their own" which is a bafflingly stupid and confusing statement because Muslims are exceptionally different from Bosnia to Albania to Lebanon to Turkey to Saudi Arabia to India to Indonesia.... not to mention the vast differences between Sunni, Shia, Sufi, and every other sub-group.

    4. Re:Perl! by quenda · · Score: 2

      I'm a Muslim and I celebrate Christmas, as do many Muslims I know,

      Cool. I don't know any Muslims who are "anti" Christmas, though there was a class at our school that had to bad Christmas carols and decorations because of one christian family, I forget what sect.
      Some Muslims I know just don't participate, even though it is a mostly secular. No decoration, no presents for the kids.

      I like the way they do it in Malaysia - there everybody joins in Christmas - Muslim, Hindu or Chinese. As well as Diwali or Chinese NY often.

    5. Re:Perl! by ThickAsTwoShortPlank · · Score: 2

      You're welcome!

      I'd like to thank the awesome Perl community for helping me keep the tradition going. There was a period several years into writing the advent calendar all by myself I totally burnt out, and the Perl community came to the rescue, taking it over for a few years and turning it into a group effort. I eventually ended up taking the project back over but I mostly kept the multiple authors format (though last year for kicks I did write the entire thing.)

      Ironically, nineteen years ago it was Slashdot that was one of the first "big players" to link to the Perl Advent Calendar that made it popular and not just something my local Perl user group thought was a silly idea in the pub on Nov 30th...

      --
      -- "The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity."
    6. Re:Perl! by p4nther2004 · · Score: 1

      There are not a lot of Christians in the Open Source community

      I suspect that there are a lot - but most people keep their religion fairly quiet.

      That said, Matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto - Ruby creator) is a Latter-Day Saint if I recall correctly.

    7. Re:Perl! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Go back to your barren sand dessert you towl head.

    8. Re:Perl! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm a Muslim and I celebrate Christmas

      And I'm an atheist and celebrate Christmas. Because there are 2 different Christmases that occur at the same time. There's the religious holiday called Christmas that is all about the birth of Jesus Christ, and there's the non-religious holiday called Christmas that is all about the trees and lights and presents and family. I celebrate the latter, and since you called yourself a Muslim, I suspect you do too.

      The problem with all these "there's an attack on Christmas! / No there isn't!" arguments is they never seem to acknowledge this duality, that while one person is talking about one Christmas the other person is talking about the other Christmas.

    9. Re:Perl! by Immerman · · Score: 1

      If there's one thing everyone should be able to get behind, it's a pagan solstice party. It's based on an undeniable physical event of great significance to everyone, and draws heavily on rituals developed by a people skilled in maintaining good cheer though particularly long and dark winters. It even caught on like wildfire among Christians. In fact, if God hadn't already seen fit to have the Birth of the Son coincide with the Return of the Sun, it might have been necessary for the keepers of religious legend to take some poetic license.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    10. Re:Perl! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm a pagan and I put up a Christmas tree. Because it was our idea in the first place.

    11. Re:Perl! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thanks for that extremely interesting post. Things I wanted to know but was afraid to ask.

    12. Re:Perl! by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 1

      I'm an atheist, but I have a curry on Diwali.
      Nom Nom Nom

      --
      I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
    13. Re:Perl! by helpfulcorn · · Score: 1

      Perhaps you know this, but Birth of the *Son* and Return of the *Sun* are linguistic coincidences, and it seems to me KJV-only evangelicals and pseudo-intellectual teenagers tend to believe that Son and Sun are not only homophones in all languages, but also related in some way, especially ancient ones. You're right in the last part, poetic license was taken because the New Testament implies that Jesus was born in spring, but there was already a really hoppin' series of pagan festivals in Europe around the winter solstice so the early Church put them together to only not take over a fun party but also to make people forget why they were celebrating them. Later on certain Protestants saw fit to ban Christmas all together because of this, and if they had their way, they would have kept banned Christmas/XMAS banned several hundred years ago... They started the war on Christmas but want to blame everyone else, that's an even crazier thing to me.

    14. Re:Perl! by Immerman · · Score: 1

      I did not consider the homophone other than out of a certain humorously decorative rhyming. The poetic relationship I see is rather the parallel between the solstice marking the day on which sun light begins increase again in Winter, and the birth of Jesus marking a symbolic increase of God's light in the world.

      At any rate, whatever the truth of the man was, the legend has obviously drawn extensively on many much older epic tales of other heroes. Take my comment as born part in snark about that, and part in sincere appreciation of the ways in which joyous rituals can spread across very different cultures to draw people together.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    15. Re:Perl! by Pseudonym · · Score: 1

      We do of course occasionally pray to Saint IGNUcius, [...]

      What do you mean, "we"? The Patron Saint of Creative Personal Hygiene is not recognised by Vim users.

      --
      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
    16. Re:Perl! by Pseudonym · · Score: 1

      I don't know any Muslims who are "anti" Christmas, though there was a class at our school that had to bad Christmas carols and decorations because of one christian family, I forget what sect.

      Christianity had the best of European culture for the better part of 1000 years. Trust Americans to force the worst of it on innocent school kids.

      Get the kids to sing this, I say.

      --
      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
  2. Re:No Advent calendars by olsmeister · · Score: 0

    or when Billy Bob Thornton is around

  3. IT Crowd by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 0

    Did anyone else see this story and immediately think of the IT Crowd episode “Calendar Geeks”?

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  4. Re:No Advent calendars by mermeid007 · · Score: 1

    Boy, I think this might be what developers have been waiting for all these years.

  5. Mathekalender by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There is https://www.mathekalender.de for German-speaking math nerds. It's primarily for kids, but adults may participate as well.
    Don't judge a book by its cover. Some questions will keep you busy for hours even if you are studying math at a university.

  6. Re:No Advent calendars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm guessing this is some sort of alt-right/nazi themed coded spam like the really really oh-so clever (((jew))) type stuff but I really don't give enough of a shit to find out.

  7. Gravitational Wave Advent Calendar by TheTiff · · Score: 1

    My favorite geek-flavored advent calendar: https://gravity.astro.cf.ac.uk...

  8. Re:No Advent calendars by PPH · · Score: 1

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307987/

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  9. Re: No Advent calendars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You're wrong. It's a legit organization but why the spam bots suddenly picked it up doesn't make any sense.

  10. Why do programmers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why do programmers celebrate Christmas on Halloween?

    Because OCT 31 equals DEC 25

  11. Correction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Jose Valim is not responsible for Advent of Code, he is simply using the site to teach Elixir. Advent of Code is the creation of Eric Wastl.

  12. POCOPHONE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    POCOPHONE F1

  13. Lol by Dj+Bongz · · Score: 1

    FreeNAS, but have Plex running on a NUC with