[Southampton-pm] May meeting

[Vytautas D]

Meeting summary:
* At the beginning we barely talked about Perl
* We talked about testing frameworks( Test::Spec,Cucumber and few others )
* Talked little bit about Perl OO ( Moose, Moe and Mouse ) and that Perl
core should improve with one of them.
* After Tim & James left, we had a heated discussion about Perl for
complete beginners. Discussed why Python might be more attractive for a
starter. Some points of what we discussed:
   - silly things like -> vs .
   - Python's interactive shell, which Perl as an interpreted language is
missing. I guess, we all agreed that despite Devel::REPL with plugins are
just a baby step, it would be great if it was in the core.
   - argument passing with default arguments, for instance callme(x,y,z,
data=abc)
https://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/controlflow.html#default-argument-values
   - we tried to avoid talking about Perl's strong side like unit tests,
regex, unicode..... as beginner would unlikely see it at the first glance.
   - we briefly talked about programming contests, Google Code Jam in
specific. Some stats:
     # In 2008 Qualification round Perl used 195 people, Python - 695
     # In 2009 Qualification round Perl used 215 people, Python - 927
     # In 2010 Qualification round Perl used 143 people, Python - 1458
     # In 2011 Qualification round Perl used 148 people, Python - 1640
     # In 2012 Qualification round Perl used 205 people, Python - 3064
     # In 2013 Qualification round Perl used 133 people, Python - 3687
     # In 2014 Qualification round Perl used 138 people, Python - 4352
     # In other rounds there are almost no use of Perl, data available:
http://www.go-hero.net/jam/14/round/0
     # Few bits I was wrong about:
       @ Ruby is getting more popular, however it was behind Perl until 2010
       @ few attempts are done in PHP, but they don't go far
       @ C++ is dominating all rounds
   - and some other aspects..
 * Talked about what's new in the Perl 6 world
   - Plans to port LWP to Perl 6 over the summer
   - Perl 6 ready image
   - Traditionally, we had discussion about the impact of Perl 6, i.e. Perl
7 will never exist. I think we didn't get into agreement that Perl 5
without mayor number bump is harmful, however, I think we somewhat agreed
that it is probably wasting a lot of core developers time discussing about
it, even though it might not be that significant, but bumping would
probably shut this time wasting discussion and we didn't agree whether it
harms Perl popularity.
* Then we talked quite a lot about Security.
* A little about perl/python primitive types

Other news:
Warren is going to Mojo conference ( http://www.mojoconf.org/mojo2014/ ),
most of us were jealous :D

I listed only some of the topics we talked about, feel free to join our new
IRC channel #sotonpm in freenode

Vytas


On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 9:55 PM, Warren Humphreys <w at rren.co.uk> wrote:

> See you there!
> I’ll probably join you for food..
>
> Cheers,
>
> Warren
>
> On 6 May 2014, at 21:24, Tim Retout <tim at retout.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Tomorrow is the first Wednesday of the month, so we'll be at the Platform
> Tavern at 8pm as usual. (I'll be there from around 6:30pm for food!)
>
> See you tomorrow,
>
> Tim
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