We would like to present Bruce Gray as a candidate to join the Board. The board will vote on Bruce's appointment at the board meeting 15th of December, 2023.

Below are Bruce's responses to the application questions.

Bio:

I am Bruce Gray ("Util" of PerlMonks). I reside in Alabama (USA), near Auburn University, with my wife of 22 years, and close to my stepson and my four school-aged grandchildren.

I work as a business analyst and contract programmer in my own small consultancy, advising and coding for many industries, currently focused on healthcare.

My non-technical passions are Theatre (Shakespear…

We would like to present Ruth Holloway as a candidate to join the Board.

The board will vote on Ruth's appointment at the board meeting 15th of December, 2023.

Below are Ruth's responses to the application questions.

I have been a software developer and system administrator for nearly forty years, starting my first paid gig before I was even out of high school, in 1985. I started using Perl in 2002, and it has been my primary programming language ever since, though I do enough JavaScript work that I can unironically call myself a "full-stack" developer these days. I've worked in library autom…

Tony writes:

``` [Hours] [Activity] 2023/10/02 Monday 0.22 #21523 comment 1.87 security issue #142 work on a fix

2.92

2023/10/03 Tuesday 2.02 security issue #142 work on a fix, push and PR 1.18 #21535 review, testing, comment, start another test

3.20

2023/10/05 Thursday 0.48 github notifications 1.17 #21529 review and several comments 0.22 #21532 review and comment 0.40 #21502 apply to blead, perldelta 0.12 #19282 check and close (obsoleted by #21473) 2.97 #21523 re-work to make large stack offsets optional, skip bigmem stack tests if large stack offse…

Dave writes:

This is my monthly report on work done during September-October 2023 covered by my TPF perl core maintenance grant.

I mainly continued my work on making the perl stack reference counted. In particular, I have been concentrating on "unwrapping" common ops to reduce any slowdown on PERL_RC_STACK builds. In fact most of the last two months has been spent on unwrapping and then optimising just a single op, OP_AASSIGN, which performs list assignment - such as

($x, @y) = (....).

This is an exceedingly complex op due to a large number of edge cases (such as assigning an odd number of elemen…

The Raku Advent Calendar

https://perladvent.org/2023/2023-12-01.html

I started to also post on dev.to and will post there mostly about topics larger than Perl : psychology of programming, software engineering and alike.

This week we:

• Worked out final resolving actions for security issues.
• Discussed recent mailing-list posts about making method non-public by default. This probably won’t work but we could open a PPC discussion on my method + $obj->&method syntax.
• Reviewed Projects in Flight - posted below
• Merged the PR for PPC 0022 (Metaprogramming API). Discussions on individual points can be made using GH Issues

• HTTPS out of the box — (Paul) has nudged Mark Gardner by email
• PPC 0013 overload in join — (Philippe) should open an issue with his thoughts on the topic
• PPC 0014 English names — (Pau…

I am sick and tired of hearing this, so let's put it this to the test. Assume you know little of Perl, or any programming language for that matter. Can you parse the code?

https://chrisarg.github.io/Killing-It-with-PERL/2023/12/06/Is-Perl-a-write-only-language.html

I hope the piece above is the first in a series to convince people to consider the reality before passing judgement. It was inspired by one of our research analysts discovering Perl and awk to simplify their lives when cleaning data.

These are some answers to the Week 246, Task 2, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on December 10, 2023 at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

You are given an array @a of five integers.

Write a script to decide whether the given integers form a linear recurrence of second order with integer factors.

A linear recurrence of second order has the form

a[n…

Three Perl releases have been published this past week, containing patches for security issues CVE-2023-47038 and CVE-2023-47039. This kept us busy for the past few weeks (explaining the somewhat thinner recent updates).

• Paul will publish a post-mortem on the recent releases, looking at what went wrong and some thoughts on how to improve it so those don’t happen again
• We discussed a plan to improve documentation of the security disclosure process
• We took note of what projects we have in flight (e.g. PPCs being implemented) and may find a way to keep that list published and updated

These are some answers to the Week 246, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on December 10, 2023 at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

6 out of 49 is a German lottery.

Write a script that outputs six unique random integers from the range 1 to 49.

Output:

3
10
11
22
38
49

For space reasons, we will display the random integers on the same line. Also, it appears that the…

It's December, and that means neglecting our responsibilities with Advent of Code. But there's still time to squeeze in the Perl Weekly Challenge, too.

6 out of 49 is a German lottery.
Write a script that outputs six unique
random integers from the range 1 to 49.

Let's be random. 6 out of 49. 25 or 6 to 4. Weasels ripped my flesh. My hovercraft is full of eels.

'Tis easy, if we remember that Perl has a rand() function, and if we remember how it works. int(rand(49)) returns a number between 0 and 48, so we need to bump it to move it between 1 and 49. Then, we need to do it six…

Originally published at Perl Weekly 645

Hi there!

Welcome to the new subscribers!

December has arrived and with it the season of the Advent Calendars. You might recall that Len Jaffe has an Advent Calendar aggregator called Advent Planet. If you know a running calendar that is not listed there, please contact Len!

It lists the Perl Advent Calendar and the Raku advent calendar, and a few more. Ingy dot Net pointed to the YAML Script Advent Calendar.

In the previous edition Mohammad sent a call to get sponsor for his Weekly programming challenge. Several people replied to me. Those messages were forw…

I am looking for some information, if there are people in this group from the Perl community. My question to them is, are there any plans to release Perl 5.38.0 32bit version?

Each week Mohammad S. Anwar sends out The Weekly Challenge, a chance for all of us to come up with solutions to two weekly tasks. My solutions are written in Python first, and then converted to Perl. It's a great way for us all to practice some coding.

Challenge, My solutions

You are given two array of languages and its popularity.

Write a script to sort the language based on popularity.

This task is relatively straight forward. Split the input into two lists (arrays in Perl)

    half = len(inputs) // 2
    words = inputs[:half]
    # Convert…

Originally published at Perl Weekly 644

Hi there,

Do you or your company sponsor Perl directly or indirectly?

As we all know, The Perl and Raku Foundation, is the parent organisation responsible for the development of Perl and Raku programming languages. They are also the single point of contact for any donations, whether individual or corporate. Without a doubt they are doing great service promoting Perl and Raku programming languages. I have personally seen how they support annual conferences around the globe.

Why am I talking about it today?

I run The Weekly Challenge project primarily focus on…

Each week Mohammad S. Anwar sends out The Weekly Challenge, a chance for all of us to come up with solutions to two weekly tasks. My solutions are written in Python first, and then converted to Perl. It's a great way for us all to practice some coding.

Challenge, My solutions

You are given an array of integers.

Write a script to calculate the number of integers smaller than the integer at each index.

This is a one-liner in Python

solution = [sum(1 for j in ints if j < i) for i in ints]

Breaking it down:

• for i in ints iterates through the supplied list, assignin…

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given two array of languages and its popularity. Write a script to sort the language based on popularity.

use Thread;
sub sort_language{
    my @language = @{$_[0]};
    my @popularity = @{$_[1]};
    my @threads;
    do{
        push @threads, Thread->new(
            sub{sleep($popularity[$_]); say $language[$_]}
        );
    } for 0 .. @popularity - 1;
    do{$_ -> join()} for @threads;
}

MAIN:{
    sort_language [qw/perl c python/], [2, 1, 3];
}

…

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given an array of integers. Write a script to calculate the number of integers smaller than the integer at each index.

use v5.38;
sub count_smaller{
    my @integers = @_;
    my @integers_sorted = sort {$a <=> $b} @integers;
    return map {  
        my $x = $_;
        (grep { $integers[$x] == $integers_sorted[$_]} 0 .. @integers_sorted - 1)[0];
    } 0 .. @integers - 1;
}

MAIN:{
    say join q/, /, count_smaller qw/8 1 2 2 3/;
    say join q/, /, count_smaller…

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given an array of integers. Write a script to return the number of reverse pairs in the given array.

use v5.38;
sub reverse_pairs{
    my @integers = @_;
    my @reverse_pairs;
    do{
        my $i = $_;
        do{
            my $j = $_;
            push @reverse_pairs, [$i, $j] if $integers[$i] > $integers[$j] + $integers[$j];
        } for $i + 1 .. @integers - 1;
    } for 0 .. @integers - 1;
    return 0 + @reverse_pairs;
}

MAIN:{
    say reverse_pairs 1, 3…

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given two arrays of integers. Write a script to find out the missing members in each other arrays.

use v5.38;
use boolean;
use Data::Dump q/pp/;
sub missing_members{
    my @r;
    my($a0, $a1) = @_;
    my $missing0 = [];
    missing_members_r([@{$a0}], [@{$a1}], $missing0);
    my $missing1 = [];
    missing_members_r([@{$a1}], [@{$a0}], $missing1);
    push @r, $missing0 if @{$missing0} > 0;
    push @r, $missing1 if @{$missing1} > 0;
    return @r;
}

sub missin…

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given an array (3 or more members) of integers in increasing order and a positive integer. Write a script to find out the number of unique Arithmetic Triplets satisfying the given rules.

use v5.38;
sub arithmetic_triplets{
    my $counter = 0;
    my $difference = shift;
    arithmetic_triplets_r($difference, \$counter, [@_[0 .. @_ -1]], [@_[1 .. @_ -1]], [@_[2 .. @_ -1]]);   
    return $counter;
} 

sub arithmetic_triplets_r{
    my $difference = $_[0]; 
    my $c…

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given an array of strings and a check string. Write a script to find out if the check string is the acronym of the words in the given array.

use v5.38;
use boolean;
sub acronym{
    my($strings, $acronym) = @_;
    return boolean(join(q//, map {(split //, lc $_)[0]} @{$strings}) eq lc $acronym);
}

MAIN:{
    say acronym [qw/Perl Python Pascal/], q/ppp/;
    say acronym [qw/Perl Raku/], q/rp/;
    say acronym [qw/Oracle Awk C/], q/oac/;
}

$ perl perl/ch-1…

1. App::lcpan - Manage your local CPAN mirror
   • Version: 1.072 on 2023-12-02, with 14 votes
   • Previous CPAN version: 1.071 was 1 year, 2 months, 13 days before
   • Author: PERLANCAR
2. Date::Manip - Date manipulation routines
   • Version: 6.93 on 2023-12-01, with 19 votes
   • Previous CPAN version: 6.92 was 5 months, 24 days before
   • Author: SBECK
3. DBD::mysql - A MySQL driver for the Perl5 Database Interface (DBI)
   • Version: 5.003 on 2023-12-01, with 54 votes
   • Previous CPAN version: 5.002 was 1 month…

This is the weekly favourites list of CPAN distributions. Votes count: 167

Week's winner: TAP::Formatter::GitHubActions (+3)

Build date: 2023/12/02 20:37:22 GMT

Clicked for first time:

• AnyEvent::Pg - Query a PostgreSQL database asynchronously
• AnyEvent::Run - Run a process or coderef asynchronously
• builtin::compat - Provide builtin functions for older perl versions
• Cache::Historical - Cache historical values
• CLI::Simple - Simple command line script accelerator
• Future::XS - experimental XS implementation of Future
• IPC::Transit - A framework for high performance message passing
• jacode -
• libwin32 -
• Log::Dispat…

These are the five most rated questions at Stack Overflow last week.
Between brackets: [question score / answers count]
Build date: 2023-12-02 20:34:11 GMT

1. Use function value from subquery in WHERE-clause + fetch it with results using DBIx::Class - [4/1]
2. How can I draw a semi-transparent shape on another image with Perl and GD? - [2/1]
3. Warning: Use of uninitialized value $count in concatenation (.) or string at p3_in .pl line 34, <SRC> chunk 140 - [1/2]
4. Emulate Javascript's 32bit signed integer arithmetic to C (or Perl) - some discrepancies - [1/2]
5. Perl pack / unpack bits when it is not multiple by…

1. App::Netdisco - An open source web-based network management tool.
   • Version: 2.070003 on 2023-11-24, with 16 votes
   • Previous CPAN version: 2.070001 was 9 days before
   • Author: OLIVER
2. DBIx::DataModel - UML-based Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) framework
   • Version: 3.06 on 2023-11-22, with 12 votes
   • Previous CPAN version: 3.05 was 3 months, 27 days before
   • Author: DAMI
3. Dist::Zilla - distribution builder; installer not included!
   • Version: 6.031 on 2023-11-21, with 183 votes
   • Previous CPA…

These are the five most rated questions at Stack Overflow last week.
Between brackets: [question score / answers count]
Build date: 2023-11-25 20:24:18 GMT

1. Why does =~ only evaluate once? - [6/3]
2. Perl: Sorting multilevel hash with values from inner hash when using Data::Dumper - [3/1]
3. Why is `sort List::Util::uniq(BAR, BAZ);` different from `sort &List::Util::uniq(BAR, BAZ);` - [2/2]
4. Perl Text::CSV_XS treats comment as data when it is the last line - [2/1]
5. Replace all multiple double forward slashes with single forward slash - [1/2]

1. App::Netdisco - An open source web-based network management tool.
   • Version: 2.070001 on 2023-11-15, with 16 votes
   • Previous CPAN version: 2.068001 was 14 days before
   • Author: OLIVER
2. DBM::Deep - A pure perl multi-level hash/array DBM that supports transactions
   • Version: 2.0019 on 2023-11-12, with 28 votes
   • Previous CPAN version: 2.0018 was 4 days before
   • Author: DCANTRELL
3. Firefox::Marionette - Automate the Firefox browser with the Marionette protocol
   • Version: 1.49 on 2023-11-18…

My usual retort is: “so what?”

Continue reading on Programming is Life »

Perl, a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language, has been an industry staple since its creation in 1987…

Continue reading on Medium »

This 101 PDF page booklet contains all sorts of reverse shells in different languages used commonly during penetration testing. It also…

Continue reading on Medium »

TL;DR

On with TASK #2 from The Weekly Challenge #239. Enjoy!

You are given an array of strings and allowed string having distinct characters.

A string is consistent if all characters in the string appear in the string allowed.

Write a script to return the number of consistent strings in the given array.

Example 1

Input: @str = ("ad", "bd", "aaab", "baa", "badab")
       $allowed = "ab"
Output: 2

Strings "aaab" and "baa" are consistent since they only contain characters 'a' and 'b'.

Example 2

Input: @str = ("a", "b", "c", "ab", "ac", "bc", "abc")
       $allowed = "abc"
Output: 7

Example…

TL;DR

Here we are with TASK #1 from The Weekly Challenge #239. Enjoy!

You are given two arrays of strings.

Write a script to find out if the word created by concatenating the array elements is the same.

Example 1

Input: @arr1 = ("ab", "c")

Output: true

Using @arr1, word1 => "ab" . "c" => "abc"
Using @arr2, word2 => "a" . "bc" => "abc"

Example 2

Input: @arr1 = ("ab", "c")
       @arr2 = ("ac", "b")
Output: false

Using @arr1, word1 => "ab" . "c" => "abc"
Using @arr2, word2 => "ac" . "b" => "acb"

This time I have a meta-question… how is people addres…

TL;DR

On with TASK #2 from The Weekly Challenge #238. Enjoy!

You are given an array of positive integers.

Write a script to sort the given array in increasing order with respect to the count of steps required to obtain a single-digit number by multiplying its digits recursively for each array element. If any two numbers have the same count of steps, then print the smaller number first.

Example 1

Input: @int = (15, 99, 1, 34)
Output: (1, 15, 34, 99)

15 => 1 x 5 => 5 (1 step)
99 => 9 x 9 => 81 => 8 x 1 => 8 (2 steps)
1  => 0 step
34 => 3 x 4 => 12 => 1 x 2…

TL;DR

Here we are with TASK #1 from The Weekly Challenge #238. Enjoy!

You are given an array of integers.

Write a script to return the running sum of the given array. The running sum can be calculated as sum[i] = num[0] + num[1] + …. + num[i].

Example 1

Input: @int = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Output: (1, 3, 6, 10, 15)

Example 2

Input: @int = (1, 1, 1, 1, 1)
Output: (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Example 3

Input: @int = (0, -1, 1, 2)
Output: (0, -1, 0, 2)

I’d probably just ask:

• the domain of the inputs (i.e. should we prepare for big integers?)
• the length of the input/output arrays.

We can i…

I am a big fan of emoji. I don’t have a position on their suitability for inclusion in Unicode on first principles or anything. I just think they’re fun, and using them is convenient and makes life a little more whimsical.

One of the more recent updates to Unicode’s emoji repertoire is SALUTING FACE, meaning that there is now an emoji equivalent to the ASCII o7. (Let’s not get into the mirroring of the image right now, I have more serious topics to discuss.)

Here’s the saluting face emoji in Apple’s emoji set:

It’s a pretty reasonable emoji in the “yellow face just trying to live its life” catego…

Another year, another thirty-one days of horror movies. I’ve changed roles at work recently, which has led to a big dip in evening calls, which meant I was present for a lot more viewings. Excellent!

Also, I took this opportunity to start logging the things I watch in Letterboxd, at least until I get sick of it. My October 2023 diary will give you a bunch of the information in this blog post, but so far without any kind of rating or commentary. I also populated some, but not all, previous years’ horror movie months. I may get around to doing the rest, we’ll see.

Despite using Letterboxd for keep…

1. Ornamenting Jingle Bells
2. Santa tackles Bitcoin, part one
3. Santa tackles Bitcoin, part two
4. Trimming the tree
5. Santa's Christmas Dancer2 Web App
6. Arango::Tango, the new mammal in town
7. HTML/XSS scrubbing and file upload validation in Catalyst
8. Who's That Clicking At The Window?

In my last blog I introduced AppRunner a relatively new service from AWS that helps application developers concentrate on their applications instead of infrastructure. Similar to Elastic Beanstalk, AppRunner is an accelerator that gets your web application deployed in the most efficient way possible.

One of my concerns has been whether Amazon is actually committed to enhancing and extending this promising service. Searching the 2023 re:Invent announcements I was disappointed to see any news about new features for AppRunner. However, it was encouraging to see that they did incl…

In May of 2021, AWS released AppRunner to the public.

AWS App Runner is an AWS service that provides a fast, simple, and cost-effective way to deploy from source code or a container image directly to a scalable and secure web application in the AWS Cloud. You don’t need to learn new technologies, decide which compute service to use, or know how to provision and configure AWS resources.

App Runner connects directly to your code or image repository. It provides an automatic integration and delivery pipeline with fully managed operations, high perform…

Every development project ultimately has a goal of providing some kind of value to the organization that has decided to initiate a software development project.

The bottom line of any software development project is the bottom line. Does the cost of the project AND the maintenance of the project create a profit?

I know what you are thinking. Not all software applications are designed to produce profit. Untrue. Even applications we call “internal” create value or contribute to the creation of value.

Let’s talk about and characterize failure first. Because its…