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2009年08月25日
Perl modules past their sell-by date
Audrey wrote about _why's disappearance and although I have honestly never heard about _why up until the recent excitement (must not have been popular in my cave). But there was a quote from _why in her blog post that made me think:
programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more.
That is very true. I have written and uploaded to CPAN quite a number of Perl module distributions. I obviously found them useful at the time I wrote them, but the Perl world moves on (rather fast as of late), and most of my distributions have fallen out of favor.
So I ask myself why I leave my deprecated distributions on CPAN. I don't need them anymore, and I certainly don't want to maintain them. I also don't care about having a three-digit number of CPAN distributions for the sake of some useless ranking. The modules will turn up as search results, and someone else might find them useful, but if other people asked me about the module in question I would probably refer them to some more modern code.
Just deleting them is proabably not a good idea either because someone might have the modules in use, though I don't flatter myself — I'm probably the only user of most of my code.
Is there some drop-off account where you can leave unloved modules?
posted at: 11:23 | path: /misc | permalink | 10 comments | 0 trackbacks
2009年08月24日
First names in the Perl community
There are some names that don't really need further qualifying; the first name is enough. "Larry", "Audrey", "Damian" — I think that even outside the Perl world, a lot of people will know who is meant. "Miyagawa" is an exception, but then in Japan the first name is generally de-emphasized and instead the given name is used even among colleagues.
posted at: 10:15 | path: /misc | permalink | 4 comments | 0 trackbacks
2009年08月23日
Signals from Audrey
Blog replies, blog posts, github activity and tweets — there have been quite a few signals from Audrey Tang lately. I'm glad Audrey is gradually coming back; I remember being inspired and awe-struck by her (back then, "his") brilliance at an Austrian Perl Workshop.
posted at: 19:04 | path: /misc | permalink | 0 comments | 0 trackbacks
2009年08月15日
In defense of polymorphism
Laurent Dami blogged Object-oriented accessors considered (sometimes) harmful and Yuval Kogman responded to it.
I agree that accessing hash elements directly can be tempting, but for me the killer argument in favor of accessor methods is polymorphism. Simply put, if you access hash elements directly, you're effectively making it completely impossible for someone else to subclass your class, or for your own class to subclass another class later. That's all.
And I agree strongly with one of Laurent's criticisms: With accessors, you never know where things really happen, making them difficult to debug. To use Laurent's example:
if ($c->request->body->length < $self->min_body) {
You have to step through a lot of methods to get to the right-hand side. It's the same with any expression.
What I would really like in the Perl debugger (but ENOTUITS) is the possibility to inspect the expression in a precedence-based tree-view like this:
1: < 2: $c 3: ->request 4: ->body 5: ->length 6: $self 7: ->min_body
and then being able to set a one-time breakpoint for line 7, that is, when
entering the min_body() method.
posted at: 13:29 | path: /dev | permalink | 1 comment | 0 trackbacks
2009年08月07日
YAPC::Europe 2009 photos
I've created a photoset with 126 photos from YAPC::Europe 2009. Enjoy!
If you search for the tag "yapceu2009", you should find more photos from other conference attendees.
posted at: 18:00 | path: /conferences | permalink | 0 comments | 0 trackbacks
2009年08月04日
"Rakudo Star" - Perl 6 will be released in Spring 2010
During YAPC::Europe 2009 in Lisbon, Patrick Michaud, the Rakudo Compiler Pumpking, has just announced that Perl 6 will be released in Spring 2010. It will not be complete, but it will be usable and useful. After all, people will only start using Perl 6 when it is "complete" (whatever that is - when will Perl 5 be complete?), but Perl 6 applications drive the development of the compiler because it helps to find bugs.
It will be called "Rakudo Star". An official announcement will follow.
posted at: 17:08 | path: /perl6 | permalink | 0 comments | 0 trackbacks
2009年08月02日
YAPC::Europe 2009 pre-conference meeting
Just got back from the pre-conference meeting. A very large number of Perl hackers arrived at the Irish pub that is located on the Expo '98 site. The poor staff were clearly overwhelmed and started treating food orders as singletons: If you ordered something that someone else had already ordered, they just assumed you're the same person and ignored you.
Still, a very good time was had, and a few (actually not so few) of us then repaired to a fish restaurant more or less next to the pub. I could finally put some faces to names and met joel, osfameron and ashb in person. We left at 11pm to get some rest before the YAPC actually starts.
There was no pre-registration at the social meeting, so I guess the organizers will be quite busy tomorrow morning.
posted at: 23:38 | path: /conferences | permalink | 0 comments | 0 trackbacks
At the edge of CPAN
CPAN is vast. Many things happen in the Perl 5 world right now. And even though I think I have quite a good overview of the Perl module landscape, there are always new distributions being developed by fresh new Perl hackers.
Here are some interesting distributions for you to look at, if you don't know them already.
posted at: 11:40 | path: /cpan_gems | permalink | 0 comments | 0 trackbacks
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