[pm-h] Group project

[B. Estrade]

On Tue, Oct 04, 2011 at 11:03:28PM -0500, G. Wade Johnson wrote:
> Ben Thomas and I have been discussing an idea for an ongoing project
> for the Houston.pm group, and I want to put the idea before the group
> for consideration.
> 
> The Perl Cookbook is now 8 years old. Despite that fact, the recipes
> and examples are still quite good. Unfortunately, some were written in
> a style that is no longer considered best practice.
> 
> What if we began updating the recipes? Any given task is relatively
> self-contained and understandable. One or more members of the group
> could propose new solutions (or even complete new recipes) and, as a
> group, we could refine them or just critique the recipes.
> 
> People who want to hone their skills (or know of a sweet solution to a
> particular problem) can generate a recipe. Others can help refine the
> results to be the best we can come up with. We could even keep the
> recipes under version control, say at github.com, so that anyone has
> the opportunity to modify the code.
> 
> Would we be interested in such a project?
> 
> This could also be an ongoing solution to the presentation problem. If
> no one is willing to present, we could devote the meeting to a few
> recipes. These would be "hands-on" or hack-a-thon type meetings, where
> people could get input on their recipes or comment on the recipes of
> others.
> 
> Let me know what you think.
> G. Wade
> 
> PS. For those of you worried about the copyright issues, I'm in contact
> with O'Reilly through our User Group contact. We're discussing how to
> make this work.

I think this is a grand idea. I wonder, for "future proofing" the
process, not only might we want to have it on Github, but a
"stackoverflow" or Yahoo Answeres type of interface comes to mind
so that multiple solutions could be proposed and voted on.

This will make it possible for the "cookbook" to evolve over time and
to provide for multiple delicious solutions. Good cookbooks provide
multiple recipes for the same dish, and often have space for home
cooks to add their own special family recipes. It would be nice to see
various solutions - some "modern", some wizardly, some examples of
what NOT to do.

A problem might be, how to match this interface with the source code.
Because we obviously shouldn't have to maintain two versions of the
same exact solution.

Another idea to manage the work is to present a weekly recipe to
create or improve - sort of like the old weekly Perl Quiz of the Week
or Perl Golf challenges used to work. For validation purposes, there
could be a provided data set and require a standard way to ingest this
data set (e.g., via STDIN). This would allow some auto-proving to take
place. Verified solutions could be presented at the end of the week
and voted on.

I think that before we know it, we might have built ourselves a
mighty fine library.

Brett

> -- 
> They made a very satisfying thump when they hit the floor.
>                             -- G'Kar - "A Late Delivery from Avalon"
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-- 
B. Estrade <estrabd at gmail.com>