House Absolute(ly) Pointless

Michael Schwern has withdrawn as a speaker from YAPC::NA 2013 because he does not believe that the conference organizers will enforce the conference’s published Code of Conduct. This is based in part on a discussion (fight? spat? brawl?) that happened on the irc.perl.org #yapc IRC channel recently. The transcript of said discussion is probably worth reading before going further. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Okay, now that you read that particular piece of unpleasantness, I’ll offer my take on this mess. People have asked me about this because I’ve been a vocal advocate of having a Code of Conduct. I still stand by my earlier position that I will not attend a conference without one.

So what’s going on here? My reading of the IRC transcript is that everyone involved acted pretty badly. Capnleela’s tone was completely unhelpful. Giving summary orders to volunteers is just going to piss people off, and lo and behold, it sure did. How about opening with something like this …

Hey, toddr, I’m really concerned about having game night near this Bikini Sports Bar. That place seems really creepy and inappropriate for a YAPC. Is the venue you’re looking at part of the same building? Will people coming to game night have to see a big sign for Austin’s “breastaurant”?

Apeiron missed a great opportunity to take the higher ground and try to defuse a situation. Instead, he responded to obnioxiousness with more obnoxiousness. This is made worse by the fact that he’s an IRC op, so he has a position of power. With great power … blah blah blah. How about something like this …

Hi, capnleela, I understand you’re upset, and I get that this is a tense issue. However, I feel like you’re giving orders rather than asking for a discussion, and that’s a bit off-putting. Maybe you could rephrase things differently and just state your concerns first?

Kyriel should have been kicked from the channel pretty much immediately. She was trolling and doing everything in her power to make a tense situation worse. I have no alternate wording for kyriel.

That all said, capnleela’s concern about the game night venue was legitimate, but apparently misplaced, since from what I can tell, the issue had already been resolved by the time this IRC fight broke out.

But does any of this rise to the level of a CoC-violating offense? Maybe, maybe not. Not all arguments, even heated ones, are CoC violations. Should the CoC be enforced on the #yapc channel a few weeks before the conference? Well, I wish everyone on IRC would be nicer all the time, and IRC is often a cesspool of nastiness, but the #yapc channel is not really an official part of the conference, and it’s not controlled by the YAPC::NA admins. What about TPF’s role in this? They don’t run the channel either, so I don’t see what they can do.

Will the CoC be enforced this year? Here’s an IRc exchange I had with Todd Rinaldo, one of this year’s YAPC::NA organizers, on the topic:

(20:46:04) autarch: toddr: I assume you do intend to enforce the CoC at the conference
(20:46:19) autarch: and I see the problems with asking for it to be enforced on #yapc
           outside the conference time frame
(20:46:35) toddr: I have no problem enforcing it at the conference.

I’m satisfied that the conference organizers take the CoC seriously and intend to enforce it at the conference.

Personally, I think the community has made good progress over the past two years towards adopting and living up to higher standards of behavior. The past three YAPCs have had clear, well-written Codes of Conduct. I also see people stepping up and moderating flame wars on the IRC channels more often. I submitted a patch to the YAPC Code of Conduct repo for next year’s YAPC to add a report handling procedure for YAPC staff which I hope to see published along with the CoC next year.

I still think we can do better, but social change requires incremental progress, and we’ll never satisfy everyone, me included.

MaxMind, Inc., the company I work for, is hiring a Senior QA Engineer. This position is a development position, but your job will focus on writing tests, especially on automating functional testing, helping us build test tools, and working with support and customers to understand and document bugs. You won’t really be developing end products, nor do we expect you to spend a lot of time doing manual testing except when that’s necessary for reproducing bugs or building a test suite.

We’d really like to find someone with a strong interest and background in QA, not just a developer looking for any development job. We have a growing body of unit tests, but there are still many aspects of our product that need better testing and would benefit from functional tests that focus on how users interact with our products.

Perl experience would be helpful since our system is written in Perl, and we expect new tools to be written in Perl unless there’s an existing tool in another language that does the jobs.

Gabor Szabo of Perl Maven recently interviewed me about my work in Perl and other random things. In retrospect, I clearly should have sat up and found some smaller headphones. I look like a very, very lazy nerd. Well, I guess that’s not so far off the mark.

Gabor is doing a series of interviews with folks offering Master Classes at YAPC::NA 2013. I’ll be offering my Intro to Moose class again this year, and it’s not too late to sign up. The class will be on the Thursday after YAPC, June 6.

This class introduces you to all the basic Moose features and gets you to write some real code using those features. The class alternates lectures with hands-on coding. The way the coding works is that I’ve written some tests, and you need to write modules with Moose that make those tests pass. This gives you very immediate feedback, as you can run the test suite at any time to see what is passing so far.

I’ve given this class a number of times and it’s consistently gotten great reviews from students. Here’s Chris Fedde’s feedback:

I thought Dave’s class was outstanding. Well prepared and highly valuable content. This course was one of the best organized I’ve had the opportunity to take.

There’s still time to sign up for this class before YAPC. It’s a steal at just $125. Typically a course like this would run much more than that, but for YAPC we trainers all reduce our prices.

Also, check out Stevan Little’s Advanced Moose class on Friday, June 7. Our two classes go quite well together. Stevan will take you further in depth with various Moose features, and also cover best practices for various Moose features. This is the first YAPC where both of these classes have been available.

The recent discussion that started with Ovid’s Perl 7 blog post has me thinking about the future of Perl, and Perl 5 in particular. We hear that Perl is dying on a regular basis, and while I take that with a grain of salt, the fact that so many non-Perl people seem to believe this is worrisome. If Perl is to have a future, it will need to attract new users.

Perl 5, as it stands, has a lot of problems. One of them is that people outside the community don’t want to learn a language that’s soon going to be replaced by Perl 6. While Larry has said repeatedly that Perl 5 and 6 are two different languages in the same family, and that Perl 6 is not intended to replace Perl 5, very few people outside the echo chamber have heard this message.

Another problem is that Perl 5 has a lot of baggage. It drags that baggage around in the name of backwards compatibility. Perl 5′s dogged commitment to backwards compatibility is, on the whole, a good thing. However, when combined with Larry’s proclamation that there will never be a successor to Perl 5, we have a truly serious issue.

If it’s true that Perl 5 and 6 are really two separate languages, then we need to be able to evolve Perl 5 and 6 separately. But how can Perl 5 evolve when there’s no way to develop a successor to Perl 5? Perl 6 is not the successor, it’s just a sibling.

Perl 5 is stuck with an increasingly crufty core implementation tied to an increasingly crufty set of no-longer-correct decisions. Some of those decisions include smartmatch, half-assed overloading, no strict by default, indirect method call syntax, -> instead of . for method calls, half-assed exceptions, and many more.

It’s unlikely that there will ever be a Perl 5 release which fixes all of these problems, because there’s no way to fix them without breaking back-compat. Without the option of bumping the major version number, how can we signal that any new version is substantially different than the last release?

Realistically, the only way to evolve Perl 5 is going to be to create a new core that implements a Perl 5-like language. Stevan Little’s Moe is one stab at a possible successor, though don’t get too excited, for now it’s just an experiment.

The future of Perl 5 is, sadly, not going to be called Perl. So if you’re interested in seeing a future for Perl 5, the discussion about Perl 7 (and 6) is a distraction. Instead, figure out how to create a new Perl 5-like language. Maybe you can contribute to Moe. Maybe you can start your own Perl5++ prototype project. But you can’t convince p5p to call perl 5.20 Perl 7, and you can’t rename Perl 6.

I’m sad that it’s come to this. Perl 6 should have been renamed years ago to preserve the health of the Perl 5 community. I’ve seen many people say that this is solely Larry’s decision, but that’s just wrong. A lot of people have invested a lot of time and effort in Perl 5, and those people count too. I don’t think their interests have been taken into account.

Of course, I look forward to being proved entirely wrong when a production-ready Perl 6 is released this Christmas and the entire Perl community moves as one to embrace it.

I’m creating a new account at Simple.com and it’s time for me to choose a password. I’m quite impressed with their password strength checker.

First of all, the get big points for recommending a pass-phrase, not a pass-word. In their words:

Passphrase? Yes. Passphrases are easier to remember and more secure than traditional passwords. For example, try a group of words with spaces in between, or a sentence you know you’ll remember. Correct horse battery staple is a better passphrase than r0b0tz26.

Damn straight! I’m so sick of idiotic websites requiring me to use a capital letter and a number but disallowing spaces. So now I have a not terribly secure password I can never remember. Of course, I just let Chrome remember all my passwords anyway, but still, it’s lame.

I also greatly appreciated the XKCD reference. For bonus points, their Javascript for password strength calls correct horse battery staple and r0b0tz26. I haven’t analyzed their entire strength determination algorithm but it seems to be pretty good, as phrases of many short words rank lower than phrases with fewer, longer words.

They also have some sort of blacklist. The phrase “yo dawg, i heard you like passphrases” gets a very low score. The blacklist could be a bit better as “to be or not to be” gets a “B”.

But overall, I’m impressed. It’s incredibly rare to see a site recommend a passphrase at all, much less really help guide you to something both secure and memorable.

Great job, Simple!

Continuing a tradition that I’m hoping other release managers will pick up (some have so far, but not all), here’s some notes about the epigraph I included with the email announcing Perl 5.17.7. The epigraph itself is from R. Scott Bakker’s The Darkness That Comes Before, which is the first in a somewhat grim speculative fiction trilogy called The Prince of Nothing. One of the main characters is a sort of intellectual warrior-philopsopher monk (this is bad description but it’s very hard to summarize this character) who underwent very intense mental and phyisical training as a child. The epigraph is a description of some of that training.

No thought.
The boy extinguished. Only a place.
This place.
Motionless, the Pragma sat facing him, the bare soles of his feet flat against each other, his dark frock scored by the shadows of deep folds, his eyes as empty as the child they watched.
A place without breath or sound. A place of sight alone. A place without before or after . . . almost.
For the first lances of sunlight careered over the glacier, as ponderous as great tree limbs in the wind. Shadows hardened and light gleamed across the Pragma’s ancient skull.
The old man’s left hand forsook his right sleeve, bearing a watery knife. And like a rope in water, his arm pitched outward, fingertips trailing across the blade as the knife swung languidly into the air, the sun skating and the dark shrine plunging across its mirror back . . .
And the place where Kellhus had once existed extended an open hand—the blond hairs like luminous filaments against tanned skin—and grasped the knife from stunned space.
The slap of pommel against palm triggered the collapse of place into little boy. The pale stench of his body. Breath, sound, and lurching thoughts.
I have been legion . . .
In his periphery, he could see the spike of the sun ease from the mountain. He felt drunk with exhaustion. In the recoil of his trance, it seemed all he could hear were the twigs arching and bobbing in the wind, pulled by leaves like a million sails no bigger than his hand. Cause everywhere, but amid countless minute happenings—diffuse, useless.
Now I understand.

Since this release was on Perl’s 25th birthday, I was looking for an epigraph that at least had something to do with birth. I chose this one because it can be seen as a sort of birth, or perhaps a rebirth of a character. He has achieved enlightenment of his sect’s teachings.

I didn’t remember it when I first thought of this passage, but the fact that his teacher is called “the Pragma” really makes this a nice quote for a Perl release.

If you’re interested in complex, weird, philosophical speculative fiction I highly recommend these novels. However, be forewarned that while the trilogy does tell a somewhat self-contained story, there’s an even larger story which is being told in further sequels, and the author hasn’t finished all of those. Supposedly there will be at least 5 (or maybe 6) additional novels, and only two have been released so far.

Since I have some new blog software, I’m enacting a new comment policy to go with it.

In the past, I’ve approved basically all non-spam comments. After my last post, the only comment I received was a very rude comment suggesting that it was an attempt to “defend” my use of WordPress. I deleted this comment.

(Aside: see the footer of this site)

So the new policy is this:

Comments are always welcome, whether you agree with anything I write or not. However, I expect you to be civil to both me and other commenters. Name-calling, threats, baseless accusations, and asshattery will all be deleted.

If you’ve visited my blog before, you might notice that it’s now running on WordPress rather than Moveable Type. I’m a little sad to be moving from a Perl application to one in PHP, but WordPress is just a better solution these days.

The main reason I moved was that I was stuck on MT4. When I first installed MT, I installed it with a Postgres backend. Then when MT5 was released, they dropped support for Postgres. That was a bit annoying, but I could live with it. The suggested upgrade solution was to export one’s blog, create a fresh MT5 install, and import. I tried that and the import failed every time. I posted a question on their support forum and never got an answer (fair enough, I wasn’t paying).

But in contrast, the tool to import from MT4 to WordPress pretty much just worked. So here we are.

We created a few new modules for working with IP addresses and subnets at MaxMind which we’d like to release. Internally we’ve been calling them MM::Net::IPAddress and MM::Net::Subnet but obviously those names won’t work for CPAN.

I’ve posted a PrePAN review request to discuss this further.

A while back, I posted an announcement of my Type distro.

The name Type was always somewhat of a placeholder, and I recently found out that the Type namespace is owned by someone else. It looks like the owner deleted this distro long ago, so I could try to get the namespace transferred, but I think this really just highlights the problems with such a generic name.

If anyone has suggestions for a new name, I’d be happy to hear it. The distro as it stands has package names such as Type::Constraint, Type::Coercion, and Type::Library. It also has some long names like Type::Constraint::Role::Interface.

Given those two facts, I’m looking for a new single word namespace to use. I really want something where I can just replace “Type” with “Word”. That rules out something like “Constraint” (which is too generic anyway).

So far my leading contender is Blazon, which thesaurus.com claims is a synonym for type. Generally speaking, I think it’s best when a single-level module name is more of a project name than a descriptor of the module (says the author of DateTime).

But if anyone has any better suggestions I’d love to hear them.