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.

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.

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 physical training as a child.

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.

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.

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 company I work for is considering hiring a Product Manager, but we’re trying to get a better sense of if this should be a full time job for a company our size, with 15 people ~5 devs (some people are not full time). If you work with one who you think is good at their job (or you are one) I’d love to schedule 15-30 minutes to pick that person’s brain.

Rocky Bernstein has been working a new Perl debugger called Devel::Trepan. I came across some discussion in a git pull request for this project a while back and I’ve been thinking of this blog post since that time. Rocky has his own unique coding style. It’s not too out there. There are some truly oddball styles on CPAN. But there a few oddities that stand out. First, he puts various use lines before the package declaration.

Back in November of 2010, I wrote an entry on this blog titled My Programming-Related Todo List. The title is a bit misleading since it was really more of a todo ‘wish’ list than a realistic list of things I could get done. I figured I’d revisit it (and depress myself in the process) to see everything I hadn’t done. CPAN Search $NEXT Well, I didn’t do it, but a bunch of other people did, so at least I can take it off my list.