I often wish that I had an infinite supply of time, motivation, and skill. If I did, I bet I could get a lot done! My programming (and programming-related) todo list includes so many items that I’m quite sure I’ll never get to most of them.
Here’s my current list, though I’m probably missing some stuff, in no particular order …
CPAN Search $NEXT
I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time, but I haven’t really done much with it. I played with CPANHQ, which had some promise, but has stalled.
My wanted list for a new search.cpan is really long, and includes:
- Open source. It’s ridiculous that a key piece of the Perl community infrastructure is closed.
- Modern Perl, probably Catalyst, Moose, and DBIC, to make it as easy as possible for the whole community to contribute.
- Modern look and feel. The current site is usable, but not beautiful.
- Excellent full text search. The current search is not bad, but it could be better.
- Author-specified documentation ordering. The Moose Manual docs should be listed first on the Moose page, for example.
- Easy to find and analyze dependency information. Basically, I’d love to take the information from http://deps.cpantesters.org/ and what used to be on the now-defunct CPAN Kwalitee site and borg that.
- Similarly, I’d like to borg CPAN ratings, AnnoCPAN, etc. All the CPAN information should be in one place with a spiffy UI.
- I’ve long wanted some sort of “web of trust” system for CPAN. A CPAN user would mark authors and/or distributions as trusted. We’d take the graph of trust relationships and try to figure out which authors and modules are most trusted. Trust here would be some combination of good code, good docs, responsive author, whatever. The idea is to organically highlight the best of CPAN, and in particular help people discover the best modules in their class. I think this would be really useful for new users, and a lot more useful than the current CPAN rating system.
- Incorporate all of BackPAN, just cause.
- A million ideas that other people will have.
This is a huge project, and while I think it would be useful, the current site works well enough that it’s not exactly urgent.
Full CLDR in Perl
I really want to make the full set of CLDR data available in Perl. This would greatly improve DateTime::Locale, and would be generally useful for lots of other things. There are two approaches, one is to write a Perl binding to the ICU4C library, the other is to parse the raw data files and generate Perl modules. DateTime::Locale is currently doing the latter, but not terribly well. A C library binding would be easier, but then requires the end user to have the ICU C library installed.
Either way, this is a metric frakton of work.
DateTime V2.0
I’d really like to rewrite large chunks of DateTime.pm and the DateTime suite using modern tools like Moose. I’d also like to fix up all of the many stupid API decisions I made over the past seven years or so. Some of this would include …
- Make a date-only module.
- Make leap seconds optional. For most uses you don’t care about this, since the exact number of seconds between two points in time is not that important. The code for dealing with leap seconds makes everything more complicated.
- Using floating point fractional seconds instead of nanoseconds.
- In particular, make the
DateTime::DurationAPI less crack-tastic. - If possible, code it for faster runtime speed.
- I bet there’s a lot of ideas out there in the community for improvements to DateTime as well.
Make DateTime::TimeZone use Zefram’s binary Olson database reader
Instead of parsing the Olson data files ourself and generating Perl code, I want to use the binary Olson data. The compiler that transforms the Olson database text files to binary data already just works. Using the binary data would be a lot less memory-intensive, and probably faster too. Zefram has already packaged all of the binary data as a CPAN distro, so we don’t even have to rely on potentially very out-of-date system-installed databases.
Really, all that’s left to do is make DateTime::TimeZone use Zefram’s code, and to make sure that the DateTime::TimeZone API is fully supported once we switch.
Note to self: Make sure that the binary data works on 32- and 64-bit systems, where “works” means that we can use the data to the limits of Perl’s integer support. I’m pretty sure that Perl can support larger-than-32-bit ints on 32-bit systems using an NV internally, so we should be able to read in 64-bit integers from the binary file.
DateTime for Perl 6
I’ve toyed with working on DateTime for Perl 6 but never gotten very far.
Mason 2.0
Jon Swartz started working on this and I’ve wanted to hack on it too, but am lacking tuits. Jon had a good blog post on What Mason 2.0 would look like a year ago. I suspect he’s suffering from the same tuit shortage I am.
I actually have some code in a Mason2 directory dating back to 2007, where I started working on a new version of the Mason parser.
WYSIWYG Editor in Silki
I’d really like to add a full WYSIWYG editor to Silki. I started doing this with CKEditor a while back, but I gave up. CKEditor is very full-featured, but almost impossible to customize without making a permanent fork. I suspect it would be better to start with a fairly minimal editor (like the YUI richtext editor) and build on top of it.
Extract the HTML to Wiki converter from Silki
Silki contains some pretty useful code for turning HTML into wikitext. This could be genericized into a replacement for HTML::WikiConverter. HTML::WikiConverter is a good idea, but its internal design is wrong. It’s very difficult to add a new syntax, especially if that syntax supports tables.
Generic blog/forum/wiki spam filter system
There are a lot of web services and tools for doing spam checking on user-submitted content. Step one is to write small modules, one per service/tool/algorithm. Step two is to take all of these and incorporate them into a single plugin-based API that ties them together with a weighting system, like SpamAssassin.
I’m actually quite likely to do this, since I really want to make Silki better at spam detection/prevention.
Finish my donor/volunteer management CRM
My animal rights group could really use a nice full-featured, very easy to use CRM. Yes, I know about CiviCRM, but last I looked it failed miserably on the easy to use front, and was missing some key features we needed.
In my dreams, this system would somehow integrate with our bookkeeping, so that every donation in the CRM linked to a bookkeeping entry, and vice versa.
I started working on this in early 2008, and I’m still not close to done.
VegGuide Technical Revamp
Right now the VegGuide code is still using Alzabo, which is really making it hard to work on certain parts of the code. I’d really like to move it over to Fey::ORM. I’d also love to move from MySQL to Postgres while I’m at it.
Rewrite perltidy using PPI
Perltidy is a really useful tool, but it’s internals are a nightmare. It replicates PPI without an actual API.
Once this was done, I could probably make it actually generate my preferred code style consistently. I’d also like to see it capable of accepting formatting plugins, where certain blocks could be formatted differently form the overall style.
… and then make PPI understand Devel::Declare-based syntax extensions
To really make perltidy and similar tools useful, they need to understand syntax-changing modules like MooseX::Declare. I have no idea how one would do this, since the syntax changes are basically injected into the perl parser itself, and PPI is a separate static parser.
Enhance VCI to support commits and create Dist::Zilla::Plugin::VCI
It’s ridiculous that each version control plugin for Dist::Zilla is totally standalone when VCI exists. However, these plugins need to be able to commit and push, and VCI only supports reading at the moment.
Find a way to eliminate the compilation hit from Moose
There’s the stalled (temporarily?) MooseX::Antlers, and we’ve discussed other approaches amongst the Moose core devs. I’d love to actually take one of these approaches and get it working.
Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming (using Moose)
I think there’s a need for a book that introduces OOP concepts, using Moose to illustrate the ideas. This book would be aimed at people who are totally new to OOP and teach them concepts and design principles. I think this could be great for attracting new users to Perl, because Moose is a really amazing tool. If you learn OOP through Moose, imagine how sad it would be to go back to Java afterwards.
Moose Class Day Two
I’ve been encouraged by brian d foy to develop a second day for my Moose class. I have some vague ideas of focusing on best practices and larger design issues as opposed to basic features. I also am toying with the idea of having the class spend a few hours actually writing a small not-entirely-a-toy application and running it against a test suite.
YAPC 2012 in Minneapolis
I’ve started working with Leonard Miller on some preliminaries for the bid. I think we could do a great job of hosting this here.
Most Likely to Succeed
Of all of these projects, the ones I’m most likely to actually get done are …
- Generic blog/forum/wiki spam filter system - I don’t know that I’ll get to something totally awesome and generic/pluggable, but enough to put some new modules on CPAN and improve Silki’s spam filtering.
- Moose Class Day Two
- YAPC 2012 in Minneapolis - surprisingly, I feel like this is one of the most tractable items. It’s a lot of work, but I know exactly what goes into it. Also, this is the only project where I already have a competent, enthusiastic co-conspirator lined up.
The items I most wish I would do are …
- Finish my donor/volunteer management CRM - I have dreams of turning it into a SaaS business, but I’m finding it hard to motivate myself for some reason.
- CPAN Search $NEXT - I think this would be great for the Perl community.
I’ve also bounced around the idea of trying to get funding for some of this work via Kickstarter/TPF grants/international ponzi schemes/Soylent Green but I’m not sure if that will ever happen.
I’ve also left out a lot of things not related to programming, including writing a novel, getting back to learning Chinese, learning to play guitar, and running for city council.
Comments
Moritz, on 2010-11-01 13:43, said:
Thanks for sharing your TODO list; I love reading such lists, because it makes me realize I’m not the only with such lists :-)
I think the first one has a really good chance to attract a larger community.
As for the DateTime TODOs, I can only recommend to “steal” from Date::Simple for a date-only module, and maybe add some methods to make it integrate nicer with DateTime.
magnus, on 2010-11-01 14:13, said:
Just out of curiosity, which customizations were you looking at doing with CKEditor? I’ve personally managed quite well with just configuration and using my own plugins, without editing the core.
http://www.wgz.org/chromatic/, on 2010-11-01 15:06, said:
I really like the “Introduction to OOP with Moose” idea. Stevan and Chris and I have discussed such a thing before.
Dave Rolsky, on 2010-11-01 15:12, said:
@magnus: I wanted to do two things. First, I wanted to take away a lot of options. The idea was to only expose things that the underlying wiki syntax supported. That meant removing things like the option to manually set image dimensions, or changing the link target, etc.
Second, I wanted to add some dialogs for wiki links, links to files/images in the wiki, etc.
Both turned out to be a nightmare, since they involved editing existing plugins.
hancock, on 2010-11-01 15:21, said:
++perltidy rewrite
magnus, on 2010-11-01 16:24, said:
@Dave yea it’s a shame such things aren’t configurable. But I’ve stuck with CKEditor, as I couldn’t find a better one. The tweaks I’ve made has taken considerably less time than if I was starting from scratch.
Dave Rolsky, on 2010-11-01 16:41, said:
@magnus: I have no intention of starting totally from scratch, but I do think it might be easier to start with a more barebones editor and add features, rather than taking CKEditor and trying to strip a bunch of pieces away.
magnus, on 2010-11-01 17:09, said:
@Dave that’s cool, I’d be very happy to see a solid CKEditor competitor.
j1n3l0.myopenid.com, on 2010-11-01 18:00, said:
I really like the first thing on your TODO list. It would be a massive project but it sounds like the sort of thing a lot of perl developers would be interested in … myself included ;)
A feature I would like to see as well would be the ability to tag modules (a la flicker, twitter, etc) by both the author and users to assist searching by functionality. That should help users find modules like Moose which, though great at its job, cannot be found when you search for CPAN for OOP :)
Peter Rabbitson, on 2010-11-02 07:39, said:
… Modern Perl, probably Catalyst, Moose, and DBIC…
Why not Fey::ORM? ;)
Dave Rolsky, on 2010-11-02 10:21, said:
@Peter: Because a lot more people know DBIC, and for this particular project, I think it’s key to make it something that’s easy for the community to hack on.
Olaf Alders, on 2010-11-02 14:11, said:
The CPAN project is a very good idea. Toronto.pm is just starting to build an open API for CPAN data. We actually just started work over this past weekend. I had put this example together using Moose before I read your post:
http://github.com/CPAN-API/cpan-api/wiki/JSON
Our plan is to have something that is free, open and distributed. A web service which will not only return metadata, but will eventually allow module tagging, up-voting, down-voting etc. Something which can function as a back end for a CPAN web site, command line client, iPhone app, Android app etc.
Dave Rolsky, on 2010-11-03 15:58, said:
@j1n310: Yes, tagging would be great. I think a good overall goal for a search.cpan replacement should be incorporating user input into the site in lots of ways. The current site is basically read-only, in that new content only shows up because it was added somewhere else (PAUSE, CPAN ratings, etc.)
pshangov.myopenid.com, on 2010-11-04 04:28, said:
Dave, obviously there are a lot of people who are willing to contribute to a new-generation CPAN frontend. So I think what a project like this needs in the first place is a good and well-known leader, and developers will follow. What could be done to get this process started?
Dave Rolsky, on 2010-11-04 10:23, said:
@pshangov: If you email me, I’ll give you an address to which you can send the massive supply of round tuits that will be needed.
cpankme, on 2010-11-04 17:05, said:
the new cpan site should be named cpandex or cpankit :-)
piotr pogorzelski, on 2010-11-09 13:56, said:
being hit lately by inconsistency with default time zone in DateTime->now [UTC] and DateTime::Format::ISO8601-parse [floating] i’m dreaming of a root namespace in CPAN (DateTime, Catalyst) having only one responsible person/team for whole module tree.
all other modules should be in private namespaces following cpan author nickname.
or stable.cpan.org, testing.cpan.org, unstable.cpan.org, when module placed in CPAN must have some “Contract” which other modules must obey if they are to be placed in the same area (stable,testing…) and extended system for testing if modules obey contracts.
or perl7.cpan.org with moosed versions of CPAN modules ;)
Dave Rolsky, on 2010-11-09 14:03, said:
@piotr: That’s *way* out of scope for what I was talking about. I’m not talking about re-engineering PAUSE, just providing a new and improved interface for interacting with its data.
piotr pogorzelski, on 2010-11-10 20:24, said:
it’s not a big deal :) for a person to write a new
web interface for PAUSE/CPAN (like everyone writes it’s own ORM).
but as someone told me some time ago about programming.
rubbish in - rubbish out, no matter how good the program is.
no offence, but how do you judge whether to use a cpan module?
i evolved this way:
have no time - i take anything;
cpan is cpan, it must be good if it’s from cpan,
so i take anything if it’s from cpan;
look what your favourite perl gurus use, and use
the same modules, even if it costs you time and money
perl/cpan needs some “distributions”, just like linux has.
some people prefer solving problems using this set of
toos/modules. some prefer other set.
i don’t mind several cpans, if each has clear rules i can accept or deny and look for somethig else, if each is consistent and verified. than i can choose the one i feel good with.
so cpan is good as a starting point. now some arbitrary decision should be made, which subset of cpan modules should be user for solving problems in selected areas and polishing of those modules should be done to improve consistency and increase code reuse and decrease number of dependiencies of other modules.
if none perl distro suits me, i still have cpan.
imho
pp