I wrote another article for LWN that has just come out from behind the paywall, Perl 5.16 and beyond. This covers changes in Perl 5.16 and future plans for Perl 5.

I wrote an article for LWN (Linux Weekly News) about the Perl 5 release process a couple weeks back. It was originally behind a paywall but it’s now readable by anyone. Another article I wrote will be published later today. I’ll post a link here once it’s out from behind the paywall. Please consider subscribing to LWN if you like this sort of thing, of course.

I feel that Perl 5 activity has increased over the past few years, but is that an illusion? I brought this topic up on the #p5p IRC channel and Nicholas Clark said, “everyone assumes growth. If you look at the ‘committers’ graph on https://www.ohloh.net/p/perl/analyses/latest I don’t think there’s been any marked growth (or reduction) in the past 10 years. Just a lot of noise”. So is he right? I wanted to figure it out.

▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬▬. ▬▬▬▬ ▬▬ ▬▬▬ ▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬. Comments Nick Patch, on 2012-01-19 15:36, said: █ █████, ████ ████ ███ ████!

I’m going through the Netflix movie rating interface right now rating films & tv shows to try to improve my recommendations. Sometimes after you rate something it asks you how often you watch films of a certain category. Presumably the category the thing you just rated belonged to. Some of the categories make sense, and some are completely insane. I can’t figure out how they could possibly be useful in determining what I like.

Today I had the privilege (or punishment?) of releasing Perl 5.15.6, the latest monthly dev release of Perl 5. Part of the Perl release tradition is to include an epigraph with each release. The epigraph is a quote of some sort that goes at the beginning of the release announcement. I can’t find the first epigraph but if I had to guess it must be a quote from Tolkien accompanying one of the releases Larry Wall did.

For many years, the VegGuide site has been hosted for free at Xmission, courtesy of Eric Waters. Eric has recently moved to a new position and is no longer at Xmission, so it’s time for us to find a new host. Update: The site is owned by my animal rights group, Compassionate Action for Animals, and we are a 501(c)(3) non profit organization. If anyone in the lights of these pixels could offer free or cheap hosting for this site, please let me know.

I’ve been playing with CoffeeScript (CS) lately, and I really like it. JavaScript (JS) is full of annoyances that make coding more tedious and error-prone that it needs to be. CofeeScript does a good job of fixing many of those annoyances. CS doesn’t provide anything like JS’s with block. That makes sense, because with in JS is completely insane and broken. But sometimes you want to be able to say “given this object, call a bunch of methods on it”.

My blog has been getting absolutely flooded with spam recently (c. 4,000+ in the last few days), and I’ve accidentally sent some legit comments to the great spam filter in the sky. The various spam plugins I have caught the vast majority, but that still left a few dozen a day for me to review. My general policy is to approve all comments, even the obnoxious trolling stuff that follows any mention of a code of conduct.

Recently on the perl5-porters list, there have been several discussions about backwards compatibility and the future of Perl 5. Jesse’s plan is interesting, and in theory sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately, it brings up some incredibly thorny issues and may not be technically possible. Even if it is possible, it’s likely that lexically preserving backwards compatibility will not work for every proposed feature. This is an old discussion. The p5p list has been debating backwards compatibility versus evolution for years.