[Melbourne-pm] Three Projects

[Scott Penrose]

Hi Melbourne Team

I am working on three Perl projects at the moment, and was wondering if anyone was interested, and specifically interested in helping out.

PerlBone

	The Beagle Board and Beagle Bone have  been very popular devices. I think the new Beagle Bone at US$89 is really a fantastic device. Yes a Raspberry Pi is cheaper, but it is more about graphics, BeagleBone is more about IO, devices etc. My opinion. The news has been about BoneScript, which is NodeJS but looks like Arduino C code (e.g. digitalWrite(3, HIGH)). Many of the examples sites talk about BoneScript and the Python. And it got me thinking about Perl. Guess what, Perl is already installed and fully running. So I wrote PerlBone.

	http://scott.dd.com.au/wiki/PerlBone

	It doesn't do all that much. But it compiles and runs fast, takes up small memory. It works, flashes LEDs etc. My intention is to make it work like Arduino, OR in a Perl OO mode, which then allows you to just use bits - e.g. my $bone = PerlBone->new(); $bone->digitalWrite(3, $bone->HIGH); or similar. FYI - like the Python and BoneScript (NodeJS) this uses the GPIO Kernel module via file system. That is something I would like to look at, as it is a very slow way to operate - especially with multiple IOs. There should be way to use direct kernel calls


Cloud9

	With regards to PerlBone, the nice integration of BoneScript is that the distributors have Cloud9 installed on the board. So you can edit and execute code on the system. Someone has put some effort into run and debug of NodeJS apps. There is some work on a Python plugin to run, and I started playing with a Perl version - unsuccessfully so far, but should be at least possible to do some basic run, compile checks etc.

	http://scott.dd.com.au/wiki/PerlBone


Julia vs PDL

	Anyone use PDL? 
	I love being able to type: $x = rcols ('out/spec_anal.out'); line $x;
	and see a pretty chart. Or better when we use the 3D ones. Also matrix calculations are pretty amazing.
	http://julialang.org/ has come out recently, and does a nice set of comparisons to other languages, mostly for speed, but also for programmability comparison. It includes javascript, Python (with NumPy) etc. So I tried some PDL. In the two examples I wrote, it was plane that I am not good enough to write the code, but they performed about the same as Python. Since Julia already uses Perl in the build scripts, and to do the calculations of the performance stats, I thought it would be good to have Perl (using PDL) in the list.


So... some new projects I would like to complete. Thought you might be interested.

Scott
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