[Omaha.pm] Fwd: Back to the Template

Jay Hannah jay at jays.net
Fri Mar 21 04:26:22 PDT 2008


:)

j



From: "Perl.com Newsletter" <elists-admin at oreillynet.com>
Date: March 14, 2008 2:09:00 PM CDT
To: <jay at jays.net>
Subject: Back to the Template
Reply-To: "Perl.com Newsletter" <elists-admin at oreillynet.com>

Perl.com update
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The Email for www.perl.com Subscribers

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Read this newsletter online at:
http://www.oreillynet.com/perl/newsletters/031408-perl-news.html? 
CMP=NLC-otx_nlrs_2html

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Beware the IDEs of March, Perl hackers. (Or beware puns that come from
Shakespeare plays brazenly stolen from Plutarch.) Here's what's new this
fortnight.

* Perl News

Google's annual Summer of Code begins soon. TPF awaits eagerly its
confirmation as a mentoring organization. In the meantime, please check
the Perl SoC wiki (lovingly prepared by Eric "The Current Josh of  
PDX.pm"
Wilhelm). Students are more than welcome. Your editor can't recommend
actually bribing them to work on these projects, but do find every
available student in your area and offer them gifts of money and food to
participate:

http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?gsoc2008

Saturday, March 15 (fire up that IDE), is the monthly Parrot Contributor
Day. In preparation for the release of Parrot 0.6.0 next Tuesday, the
Parrot developers will be in #parrot on irc.perl.org all day to fix  
bugs,
update documentation, and help new developers get Parrot installed and
running on their machines. Of particular interest this week is Parrot on
non-Linux platforms -- especially 64-bit platforms.

One of the goals of Parrot is to make Perl 6 possible. There are  
plenty of
opportunities to hack on that without knowing C. You do need to know a
little bit about Parrot as well as the Parrot compiler tools. Klaas-Jan
Stol is writing a series of tutorials on how to build your own  
language on
Parrot. (That language can also be Perl 6.)

http://www.parrotblog.org/2008/03/targeting-parrot-vm.html

Dave Rolsky, TPF's grant manager for Parrot, posted a report for the
months of January and February:

http://www.perlfoundation.org/ 
parrot_grant_update_for_january_and_february

Nicholas Clark, Andy Armstrong, and Rafael Garcia-Suarez helped Tom  
"Spot"
Callaway get Perl 5.10 into Fedora Core 9. Servers the world over  
rejoice:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/11/0833217

Andy Lester is looking for someone to take over perl101.org. Your editor
suggests that encouraging people to use Perl as it exists in 5.10 --  
with
all of the nice features and discipline and best practices as they stand
now -- is highly important:

http://perl101.org/

Along those lines is the new Enlightened Perl Organization, designed to
encourage the use of Perl as a modern, high-level development platform.
You may recognize some of the signatories as contributors to Catalyst,
DBIx::Class, Moose, RT, and SVK:

http://www.enlightenedperl.org/

Andy Lester has argued that good code is the best form of evangelism.  
Your
editor also likes getting big checks in the mail:

http://perlbuzz.com/2008/03/good-perl-code-is-the-best-form-of- 
evangelism.html

... and Andy also sees what may become a promising trend of businesses
admitting that, yes, the camel helps them get their work done
effectively:

http://perlbuzz.com/2008/03/more-companies-openly-supporting-perl- 
projects.html

While you're logging into #parrot, remember that the 15th is also the
deadline for YAPC::NA talk proposals. Your editor has already offered to
talk about how to recognize and rescue a damaged project:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/07/1725220

Mark Leighton Fisher released a new version of pmtools, for everyone
living in exile away from a lovely and true Unix-like platform:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/pmtools-1.10/

Jesse Vincent and Best Practical released the customized code behind
rt.cpan.org:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/05/0023258

David Landgren, your editor's favorite expat living in France,  
summarized
the activities on Perl 5 Porters:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/06/2255257

Your editor minuted the Perl 6 design meetings:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/13/2015258
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/13/2015225

* Perl at O'Reilly

There are two well-known templating styles in the world today. One mixes
your language's code with markup in the output format, calling back into
your code to fetch data. The other executes a mini language with
conditionals, loops, and substitutions, operating on data passed into  
it.
Both work, though both have strengths and weaknesses. There's also a
third approach. James Robson describes the reverse callback templating
technique, and demonstrates how it has advantages over the other two  
more
famous approaches:

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2008/03/14/reverse-callback-templating.html

Your editor riffed on Bryce "Not a Josh" Harrington's ideas about the
ratio of users to contributors, and what that means for platforms more
exotic than a GNU/Linux distribution running on a 32-bit x86 processor:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2008/03/ 
the_contributoruser_ratio_vari.html

Speaking of contributor/user ratios, Dustin Puryear wondered how much
life OpenOffice.org has remaining:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2008/03/ 
openoffice_how_much_longer_doe.html

Andy Oram considered the SD West conference a bellwether for programming
theory:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2008/03/sd_west_2008_wrapup.html

Tim O'Reilly revealed that Markmail is now tracking over half a million
messages in seventy five Perl mailing lists:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/03/perl-mailing-lists-added-to- 
ma.html

That's it for this week. Your editor now idly wonders a few things:

- do you know what The Perl Foundation does?
- do you visit its web site ever/occasionally/often?
- did you know that it has its own weblog?

http://news.perlfoundation.org/

- how can TPF reach the people it needs to reach but doesn't already
know?

Your editor wins a shiny new quarter if your answers match his,

- c
chromatic
editor Perl.com, et al

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