In Part 1, I compared Perl’s regexp features with sed and Awk. In this concluding part, I’ll cover examples that make use of Perl’s extensive built-in features and third-party modules.

Perl has a much bigger collection of built-in functions compared to Awk. For command-line usage, I often need tr, join, map and grep. I like that arrays and hashes are distinct in Perl and applying sort on these data types is much simpler compared to Awk.

This problem wants to append columns to rows that have too few, like the b, c and d rows:

a,10,12,13
b,20,22
c,30
d,33

This app…

A shell (like Bash) provides built-in commands and scripting features to easily solve and automate various tasks. External commands like grep, sed, Awk, sort, find, or parallel can be combined to work with each other. Sometimes you can use Perl either as a single replacement or a complement to them for specific use cases.

Perl is the most robust portable option for text processing needs. Perl has a feature rich regular expression engine, built-in functions, an extensive ecosystem, and is quite portable. However, Perl may have slower performance compared to specialized tools and can be more verb…

[This article is part of our Popular articles project to update Perl.com for contemporary practices]

If you’re reading this article, you’re likely looking for a simple way to download and install the Perl programming language. Or you already have Perl installed as part of your operating system, but it’s older than the currently-supported versions (5.32.1 or 5.30.3) and you’d like to use the latest and greatest features. The download options may seem daunting, especially if you’re new to computers or programming. We’ll take things step by step, and soon you’ll be on your way to…

Paul “LeoNerd” Evans is a CPAN author, blogger, and core Perl contributor. He introduced the experimental isa operator in Perl 5.32 and the try/catch syntax in an upcoming version.

Lets see—I’m going to do this in reverse chronological order.

Currently I’m a self-employed contractor, splitting my time between Perl and other computery things, and electronics. Most of the jobs I’ve had before I did that were based on Perl, with the minor exception of a little Internet startup company called &ldqu…

Before I became a computer programmer, I tried my hand at being a human programmer, in the form of a wordsmith, as I called myself then. I had various jobs as a writer, editor, translator and journalist, but I met with little success, for two main reasons. In those days you needed a publisher to find your work interesting enough to publish before anyone could read it, and that was a pretty high bar. And in the second place, it was difficult to get the humans to react to the content I wrote (I’m still exercised that the movie reviewer would get more letters to the editor than I did after…

For a week we lost control of the Perl.com domain. Now that the incident has died down, we can explain some of what happened and how we handled it. This incident only affected the domain ownership of Perl.com and there was no other compromise of community resources. This website was still there, but DNS was handing out different IP numbers.

First, this wasn’t an issue of not renewing the domain. That would have been a better situation for us because there’s a grace period.

Second, to be very clear, I’m just an editor for the website that uses the Perl.com domain. This means that I’m…

Regarding his RakuAST Grant, Jonathan Worthington reports some awesome progress for May 2021.

Side note: due to a bug in the Markdown rendering in this blog post, the less-than and greater-than characters in code blocks are double-encoded. Please refer to this gist for a correctly rendered version.

Anyway, here is Jonathan's report:

During May I focused on filling out the regex part of RakuAST, with the result that the majority of the constructs found in Raku regexes now have AST nodes and can be compiled by the RakuAST-based compiler frontend. Of note, I did AST nodes for:

• Declarations in regexes…

The Grants Committee has received the following grant proposals for the May 2021 round: * Raku Dispatch and Compiler Improvements * Persistent Data Structures for Raku

Before the Committee members vote on any proposal, we like to solicit feedback from the Perl and Raku communities.

Review the proposals at their individual links and please comment there by June 6, 2021. The Committee members will start the voting process following that and the conclusion will be announced shortly after.

Daniel Sockwell

Immutable, persistent data structures give a program certain superpowers that it's very hard to have in any other way: they allow the program to "time travel" (view previous application state); they allow let the program share data across threads or asynchronously save it to disk without needing locks; they enable a much more purely functional style of programming – which results in code that many software developers find much easier to reason about. Because of these benefits, many languages with strong support for functional programming (Clojure, Elm, Haskell, etc…

Welcome to the latest ‘The Perl and Raku Conference in the Cloud’ newsletter.

This issue: * The schedule is available * Submit a Lightning Talk * Volunteers needed ( virtual moderators, hosts ) * Do you want to host a virtual BoF? * Order your conference shirt * About the Conference in the Cloud * Get your tickets * How to Reach Us

The conference is in just 2 weeks! We're really looking forward to seeing everyone again. We’ve got a lot of great talks lined up! The schedule is available on our website.

Lightning Talks are short, 5 minute, talks that may be ser…

This is a monthly report by Tony Cook on his Maintaining Perl 5 grant. We thank the TPF sponsors to make this possible.

Approximately 39 tickets were reviewed.

[Hours]         [Activity]
  2.66          #16249 read code, try to work up some implementation
                #16249 more implementation
  0.80          review list discussion, comment on #17999 re walking
                backwards through UTF-8
  0.73          #18588 debugging
  1.43          #18670 review CI results, reproduce on Win32, testing, add
                debug code
                #18670 find issue, fix, testing, push to…

Jonathan Worthington

I currently have two ongoing grants:

• A Raku performance and reliability grant, under which almost all the time is currently dedicated to implementing a new generalized dispatch mechanism. Progress so far indicate it will offer both performance improvements and simplify future development.
• A RakuAST grant, which involves implementing a user-facing document object model for the Raku programming language. This will provide a foundation for macros and a number of other meta-programming features. A new compiler frontend is being developed in parallel with the new AST.

T…

These are some answers to the Week 116 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days (June 13, 2021). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

• You are given a number $N >= 10.*

• Write a script to split the given number such that the difference between two consecutive numbers is always 1 and it shouldn’t have leading 0.*

Print the given number if it impossible to split the number.

Example:

Input: $N = 123…

On behalf of the Dancer Core Team, I'd like to announce the availability of Dancer2 0.301004. This is a maintenance release with two bug fixes only: one corrects an omission from the tutorial, and the other adds a missing dependency to Dancer2's cpanfile.

You can read the complete [changelog](https://metacpan.org/changes/distribution/Dancer2)
here. If you need help, please reach out on IRC (irc.perl.org#dancer) or our
[mailing list](https://lists.perldancer.org).

Happy Dancing!
Jason/CromeDome

These are some answers to the Week 115 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days (June 6, 2021). This blog post offers 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 of strings.

Write a script to find out if the given strings can be chained to form a circle. Print 1 if found otherwise 0.

A string $S can be put before another string $T in circle if the last character of $S is same as first character of $T…

Let me share my views in response to the questions raised.

https://perlweeklychallenge.org/blog/lets-be-friend

On behalf of the Dancer Core Team, I'd like to announce the availability of Dancer2 0.301003. While there are a number of bug fixes and documentation improvements in this release, there are two new features that I'd like to point out:

• Git support from the CLI: When scaffolding a new Dancer2 app from the command line, you can now initialize a new Git repository and set the remote all at once. Passing the --git option to dancer2 gen will initialize a new repository, and --remote will take a URL for your remote repository (git:// and https:// are both supported).

• Out-of-the-box Docker support: Ther…

Time to celebrate ...

As you all know, I joined Oleeo last month, it was busy getting my head around the code base and infrastructure. I had to slow down my activities with regard to the routine Perl Weekly Challenge tasks.

I would like to talk about two happy interactions last month. Ever since I started the Perl Weekly Challenge project, I hardly find time to contribute to CPAN whether it is my personal distributions or others. The only time I contribute to others work is when I get my monthly assignment from Pull Request Club. Lets get back to the subject, last month, I received RT #136670 fr…

[Update: the CPAN Request Tracker was saved. It’s now run by a new team of volunteers and none of my suggestions below are required.]

Two weeks ago, we learned that the CPAN Request Tracker was closing down early next year. I proposed a plan that CPAN authors could follow to ensure that their users can still find somewhere to report bugs in modules (and, perhaps more importantly, to see what bugs have already been reported in modules).

But that’s only part of the problem. In fact, it’s probably a minor part of the problem. If you’re an active CPAN author, then you probably already knew about the…

CPAN RT is going away. CPAN authors have until the beginning of March to extract any useful information from it.

RT is the “Request Tracker”, a bug tracking system that is written by Best Practical. For almost as long as I can remember, anyone who uploads a module to CPAN gets a free ticket queue for their module at rt.cpan.org. MetaCPAN assumes that’s where people should report bugs in your module and helpfully adds an “issues” link that goes to the appropriate page in RT.

But now that system is going away. It will be switched off on the 1st March 2021. The Perl NOC team is spread pretty thinly…

Blog posts are like busses. You wait months for one and then two come along on consecutive days!

Yesterday I wrote about how we didn’t need a blogging platform for the Perl community – all we really needed was a good-looking feed aggregator. I mentioned Perlsphere as one such aggregator.

Then Matthew commented, saying that Perlsphere looked a bit broken as Dave Cantrell’s posts from a few years ago frequently pop up there as new posts. I had a quick look at the problem and couldn’t quite work out what was going on. His web feed seems valid, but Perlsphere didn’t seem to recognise the dates of th…

I think it was at YAPC Copenhagen in 2008 that a small group of us first discussed the idea of building a shared blogging platform for the Perl community. It was over a year later that we launched blogs.perl.org.

I remember a lot of discussions over that time where we tried to thrash out exactly what we wanted to build. I know that one of my main drivers was that I wanted to replace the journals feature of use.perl. For those of you too young to remember, use.perl was a Perl community web site from the dawn of time. The site ran Perl news on its front page, but users could also have their own j…

What do you do when you’re stuck inside because Coronavirus means that your country is in lockdown? Well, you write a book, of course. Or, to be more accurate, you cobble together fifty or so old blog posts into a book.

So that’s what I’ve done. Now you can read some of your favourite Perl Hacks blog posts in a handy Kindle book. Other ebook marketplaces are, of course, available – but I haven’t had the time to make a version that’s available from anywhere else yet. That might follow if enough people ask for it.

The book is, predictably, called The Best of Perl Hacks and it’s available from Amaz…

Last week I was in Riga for this year’s European PerlCon (the conference formerly known as YAPC::Europe). As has become traditional, here’s my report of the conference.

My conference began on Tuesday night at the pre-conference meet-up. Most people get into town on the night before the conference starts and the organisers always designate a local bar as a meeting place. This time, as the conference was being held in a hotel, the meeting place was a room in the hotel just outside the main conference room. It’s always good to meet up with friends who you might not have seen since the previous con…

Today I was invited to join Gabor Szabo for a live pair programming session, where we worked on adding Docker and CI to his course management application. You can view the video of our informal competition who is the worst typist here.

At first I was bit skeptical about the concept of live coding (who wants to watch people google^w code for two hours?), but in the end it was a funny and informative (for me) session. Maybe I'm just totally deprived of live human interaction (thanks, Corona), but I think I'd enjoy similar sessions also under normal circumstances.

• I forgot a lot of…

During the great RT will be shutdown craze earlier this year, I updated my Dist::Zilla setup to use a custom author bundle (Dist::Zilla::PluginBundle::Author::DOMM) so I can unify my Dist::Zilla config in one place (instead of copying dist.ini from project to project, adding & modifying it from time to time, but never backporting improvements to older projects).

Two of my decisions might have been not too smart (as indicated by various pull requests), so I'm now looking for feedback...

I stopped generating META.yml files and now only generate META.json. As far as I can tell…

In some regards, I'm a very old school person. For example I do not like the concept of streaming audio (via Spotify et.al.). I want MP3s on my hard disk (and/or vinyl on my record player). I want access to my music when I'm offline (and I'm offline a lot) and without using a so-called smart phone (I prefer vintage USB-stick MP3 players). My partner thinks the same (I guess 25+ years of my propaganda had some influence..).

But "modern" sites make it rather hard to actually download content (even if it's free). They offer links to a myriad of apps, but often no download button. At least a lot of…

This was another fun one. It took me some time to get the logic right (or left?), but in the end I came up with a nice solution. BTW, this will be the last daily blog post, as I'll have to finish some work projects, and start with some holiday projects.

https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/12

my @in  = map { [/^(\w)(\d+)$/] } <>;
my @dir = qw(N E S W);
my $cur = 1;
my $r   = 0;
my $c   = 0;

We again parse the map into a list of ops and values. Then we set up some things we'll need, like the list of directions and the current heading ($cur) which is an index into the dir-array. $r and $c…

Finally, some Game of Life

https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/11

Today I needed quite a bit of code, so let's split it up:

my @map = map { chomp; [ split // ] } <>;
my $h   = @map;
my $w   = $map[0]->@*;
my $occ = 0;
my $max = 4;
my @around =
    ( [ -1, -1 ], [ -1, 0 ], [ -1, 1 ], [ 0, -1 ], [ 0, 1 ], [ 1, -1 ], [ 1, 0 ], [ 1, 1 ] );

After getting the input and storing it into a 2-dimensional list, I set up some other things we'll need: the **h**eight and **w**idth of the map, the number of occupied seats, the maximum number of neighbors and a list of "vectors" to look around (left…

Last year I wrote a (poignant?) review of TPRCiC as one of my first blog posts.

Once again this year, I attended The Perl and Raku Conference in the Cloud (and I even talked 😱 🙊), so here we go again for the review!

Brad Lhotsky came with a very solid talk... 👍

With a live demo (he's mad). That worked! (he's lucky good 😁)

And the overall was very nice to listen (he's maybe experimented at this exercise - EDIT: yes he is).

I enjoyed the topic (ElasticSearch), the comparisons and expertise about this technology and other related ones.

And…

About 10 years ago I tried gource and made a visualization of the commit history of perl5.git. It was when grouce was new, shiny and cool:

10 years passed like a blink and it has been a remarkable decade for perl5.git. As we see the growth of commit volume, there is also stable pace of releasees thanks to the standardization of release procedure. With relocation of communication platform, participation and small fixes seems to be much easier. While it has not be a perfectly stable decade, it is a good one.

So as a 10-yearly review, here's the updated version of that gource visualization on perl5…

This year, I am unemployed so let’s try to attend and follow the Perl and Raku Conference In the Cloud. Feeling quite bored since those days, I am not too much into computer stuff but more like gardening, fixing my house, take care of my cat, cooking and do wood work, but let’s try.

I bought a ticket.

A mentee asked me over the weekend if there was a way within a Mojolicious web application to store the routes separately from the main application class. Here’s one way. These instructions assume you’re using Perl 5.34 and Mojolicious 9.19 (the latest as of this writing) via the terminal command line on a Linux, Unix, or macOS system; make the appropriate changes if this doesn’t apply to you.

First, if you haven’t already, create your Mojolicious app at your shell prompt:

$ mojo generate app Local::RouteDemo
  [mkdir] /Users/mgardner/Projects/blog/local_route_demo/script
  [write] /Users/mgardn…

Challenge, My solutions

The Perl Conference is this week, and there are many speakers I'm looking forward too. I do have a ticket to support the effort, but won't watch too many live. The event is 1am - 8am AEST, which kinda sucks for me.

On to this week's task.

Ask I stranger on a street (in a Covid safe way of course!) to pick a number between one and 6, and they are likely to say one of six answers (one, two, three, four, five or six). Never 3.4, or 2.6. This was featured in an episode of Numb3rs. We are programmers, and think differently. So whenever a task mentions…

It's once again this time of the year! 😄

The Perl and Raku Conference (in the Cloud) is back!

It's happening tomorrow and you will be able to follow the talks on YouTube but if you really want to join the fest, you have to pay a small fee of 10$ to receive the precious password to join the conference (I recommend to to this).

You will then be able to join thanks to zoom

• Main page: start page that contains all the links
• Schedule: to see all talks and their descriptions
• Wiki: where you can find infos about BOFs and more

Last year I enjoyed a lot the conference and wrote this…

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

You are given an array of strings. Write a script to find out if the given strings can be chained to form a circle. Print 1 if found otherwise 0. A string $S can be put before another string $T in circle if the last character of $S is same as first character of $T.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Graph;
use Graph::Easy::Parser;

sub build_graph{
    my @words;
    my %first_letter_name;
    my $graph = new Graph();
    while(my $s = ){
        chomp($s);
        my $first_let…

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

You are given a positive integer $N. Write a script to find out the next Palindrome Number higher than the given integer $N.

use strict;
use warnings;
sub next_palindrome{
    my($n) = @_;
    {
        $n++;
        return $n if $n eq join("", reverse(split(//, $n)));
        redo;
    }
}

MAIN:{
    my($N);
    $N = 1234;
    print next_palindrome($N) . "\n";
    $N = 999;
    print next_palindrome($N) . "\n";
}

$ perl perl/ch-1.pl
1331
1001

This is proba…

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

You are given a positive integer $N and a digit $D. Write a script to check if $N can be represented as a sum of positive integers having $D at least once. If check passes print 1 otherwise 0.

use strict;
use warnings;
sub is_represented{
    my($n, $d) = @_;
    my @contains = grep { grep { $_ == $d } split(//) } (1 .. $n);
    return $n == unpack("%32C*", pack("C*",  @contains));
}

MAIN:{
    print is_represented(25, 7) + 0 . "\n";
    print is_represented(24, 7) + 0…

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

Write a script to convert the given absolute path to the simplified canonical path.

use strict;
use warnings;
##
# Write a script to convert the given absolute path to the simplified canonical path.
# The canonical path format:
#     - The path starts with a single slash '/'.
#     - Any two directories are separated by a single slash '/'.
#     - The path does not end with a trailing '/'.
#     - The path only contains the directories on the path from the root directory to…

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

You are given 5x5 matrix filled with integers such that each row is sorted from left to right and the first integer of each row is greater than the last integer of the previous row. Write a script to find a given integer in the matrix using an efficient search algorithm.

use strict;
use warnings;

use boolean;      
use constant MATRIX_SIZE => 5;   

sub matrix_search{
    my($matrix, $search) = @_;
    unless(@{$matrix} == 1){  
        my $half = int(@{$matrix} / 2…

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

You are given a text file. Write a script to display all valid phone numbers in the given text file.

use Capture::Tiny q/capture_stdout/;
use PhoneNumberParser;

MAIN:{
    my $parser = new PhoneNumberParser();
    while(my $line = ){
        $line =~ s/^\s+|\s+$//g;
        my $syntax_error = capture_stdout {
            $parser->parse($line); 
        };
        print("$line\n") if !$syntax_error;
    }
}   

__DATA__
0044 1148820341
 +44 1148820341
  44-11-4882-0341
(44…

You may have noticed that some perl.org services were unavailable this weekend.  Email continued to flow, and no data was lost.

The short version of the story is that we were bitten by this bug. and learned a lot about how Kubernetes works while we figured out what the issue was.

Sorry for any inconvenience!

We sent the below email to all the CPAN Mirror contacts yesterday:

An Important Update about the CPAN Mirror List

You're receiving this email because you're listed as a contact point for a CPAN mirror. Thank you! The mirror network has been a huge part of CPAN’s success. Soon, the way clients use CPAN mirrors is changing. You don't need to do anything, but after reading this email, you might want to.

Some background: For a long time, when the CPAN client (aka CPAN.pm) started up for the first time, it prompted users to configure it by picking a nearby mirror. The assumption was that it would be b…

 The perl.com domain was hijacked this morning, and is currently pointing to a parking site.  Work is ongoing to attempt to recover it.

 We encourage you NOT to visit the domain, as there are some signals that it may be related to sites that have distributed malware in the past.

  Some users may have it selected as their CPAN mirror.  To update your mirror in CPAN.pm use o conf urllist http://www.cpan.org/

# perl -MCPAN -eshell
cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v2.20)
Enter 'h' for help.

cpan[1]> o conf urllist http://www.cpan.org/
Please use 'o conf commit' to make the config perma…

Update 2/21/2021:

Updated information about the future of rt.cpan.org can be found at https://news.perlfoundation.org/post/rt-cpan-org-future

Update 2020-12-13:

rt.cpan.org will be sunset on March 1st, 2021 due to low and declining use.

Back when we started this service, it filled a need by providing a place for CPAN authors to track bug reports and feature requests. In recent years github.com and other sites have added issue tracking to their git repo hosting and many CPAN authors have migrated to these sites.

If you are a CPAN author, there are several tools to help you migrate existing tickets:

• h…

Prompted by this post on PAUSE running out of disk space, I thought I'd refresh my own post "Top 50 authors by disk space on BackPAN" (Dec 26, 2019) and add a stat for CPAN too. Hopefully this will be a regular post, ish.

On CPAN

Source: https://www.cpan.org/indices/find-ls.gz (~14MB as of this writing), but more readily used: https://www.cpan.org/indices/du-k.gz (~80KB as of this writing).

Total size of CPAN:

% zcat du-k.gz | perl -lne'@F=split /\s+/, $_, 2; $F[1] eq "." and printf "%.1fGB\n", $F[0]/1024/1024 and last'

29.0GB

So, CPAN is not that big by today's…

1. App::lcpan - Manage your local CPAN mirror
   • Version: 1.068 on 2021-06-05
   • Votes: 14
   • Previous version: 1.067 was before
2. Dancer2 - Lightweight yet powerful web application framework
   • Version: 0.301004 on 2021-06-06
   • Votes: 125
   • Previous version: 0.301003 was 3 days before
3. Minion - Job queue
   • Version: 10.22 on 2021-06-10
   • Votes: 84
   • Previous version: 10.21 was 2 months, 21 days before
4. Minion::Backend::mysql - MySQL backend
   • Version: 0.29 on 2021-06-07
   • Votes: 12
   • Previous version: 0.28 was 3 d…

This is the weekly favourites list of CPAN distributions. Votes count: 149

Week's winners (+3): Perl::LanguageServer 

Build date: 2021/06/12 14:33:40 GMT

Clicked for first time:

• aliased::factory - shorter versions of a class tree's constructors
• Alt::common::sense::TOBYINK - provides a clean-room reimplementation of common::sense
• App::Acmeman - manages ACME certificates
• App::Env - manage application specific environments
• App::pathed - munge the Bash PATH environment variable
• Arguments - Perl subroutine type-checking
• Argv - Provide an OO interface to an arg vector
• Attribute::Overload - Attribute that makes…

These are the ten most rated questions at Stack Overflow last week.
Between brackets: [question score / answers count]
Build date: 2021-06-12 13:39:23 GMT

1. What is the best way in Perl to iterate a loop and extract pairs or triples - [7/6]
2. Perl sorting Alpha characters in a special way - [6/3]
3. Trimming carriage return (\r) in Perl - [5/4]
4. Is there any way to change the value of constant in Perl? - [5/3]
5. search for a key value pair and append the value to other keys in unix - [3/6]
6. Read a file line by line for an exact match using perl script - [3/3]
7. Counting number of lines with conditions - [2/4]
8. How do…

1. App::lcpan - Manage your local CPAN mirror
   • Version: 1.066 on 2021-05-31
   • Votes: 14
   • Previous version: 1.034 was 1 year, 11 months, 10 days before
2. CGI - Handle Common Gateway Interface requests and responses
   • Version: 4.53 on 2021-06-03
   • Votes: 40
   • Previous version: 4.52 was 30 days before
3. Dancer2 - Lightweight yet powerful web application framework
   • Version: 0.301003 on 2021-06-03
   • Votes: 125
   • Previous version: 0.301002 was 1 month, 15 days before
4. Future::AsyncAwait - deferred subrout…

This is the weekly favourites list of CPAN distributions. Votes count: 107

This week there isn't any remarkable distribution

Build date: 2021/06/05 14:35:54 GMT

Clicked for first time:

• Acme::Boolean - There is more then one way to be true.
• Alter - Alter Ego Objects
• CLASS - Alias for __PACKAGE__
• Class::Accessor::Lazy - class accessors generation with lazy accessors and fast mode support.
• Class::ArrayObjects - utility class for array based objects
• Class::Axelerator - Evade OO taxes
• Class::Closure - Encapsulated, declarative class style
• Class::Constructor - Simplify the creation of object constructors
• Class…

These are the ten most rated questions at Stack Overflow last week.
Between brackets: [question score / answers count]
Build date: 2021-06-05 14:22:18 GMT

1. raku, library was not found - [5/1]
2. perl regex, remove what is captured - [3/3]
3. Given a number of variables to test for definedness, how to (easily) find out the one which was left undefined? - [3/3]
4. How do I get the name of the currently-running Perl script? - [2/3]
5. How can I insert a blob and timestamp into a table in Oracle using Perl? - [2/2]
6. matching cond in perl using double exclaimation - [2/2]
7. How to read Excel file in Perl by sheet name - [2…

Foto by Carsten Tolkmit 

We’ve had a week of heated discussion within the Perl 6 community. It is the type of debate where everyone seems to lose. It is not the first time we do this and it certainly won’t be the last. It seems to me that we have one of those about every six months. I decided not to link to many reiterations of the debate in order not to feed the fire.

Before defining sides in the discussion it is important to identify the problems that drives the fears and hopes of the community. I don’t think that the latest round of discussions was about the Perl 6 alias in itself (Raku), but…

When I need to program something, most of the time I use Perl 5, Go or Perl 6. Which one depends on the existence and maturity of libraries and the deployment strategy (and I must admit, probably my mood). Most applications I write at work are not that big, but they need to be stable and secure. Some end up in production as an extension or addition to the software that is the core of our authentication and authorisation infrastructure. Some programs are managed by other teams, e.g. of sysadmin-type applications like the monitoring of a complex chain of microservices. Finally, proof of concept…

There was an interesting discussion on #perl6 (irc.freenode.net) about the use of rakudobrew as a way for end-users to install Rakudo Perl 6 (see how-to-get-rakudo).

rakudobrew, inspired by perlbrew, is a way to manage (and compile) different versions of rakudo. nine argued that it’s primarily meant as a tool for rakudo developers. Because of the increased complexity (e.g. when dealing with modules) it’s not targeted at end-users. While being a big fan of rakudobrew, I agree with nine.

The problem is that there are no Linux binaries on the download page (there are for MacOS and Windows), so user…

EDITED on 20170211: syntastic-perl6 configuration changes

If you’re a Vim user you probably use it for almost everything. Out of the box, Perl 6 support is rather limited. That’s why many people use editors like Atom for Perl 6 code.

What if with a few plugins you could configure vim to be a great Perl 6 editor? I made the following notes while configuring Vim on my main machine running Ubuntu 16.04. The instructions should be trivially easy to port to other distributions or Operating Systems. Skip the applicable steps if you already have a working vim setup (i.e. do not overwrite you .vimrc fil…

I think that Perl 6, as a fairly new language, needs good tooling not only to attract new programmers but also to make the job of Perl 6 programmers more enjoyable. If you’ve worked with an IDE before, you certainly agree that syntax checking is one of those things that we take for granted. Syntastic-perl6 is a plugin that adds Perl 6 syntax checking in Vim using Syntastic. Syntastic is the leading Vim plugin for syntax checking. It supports many programming languages.

If the plugin proves to be useful, I plan on a parallel track for Perl 6 support in Vim. On one hand, this plugin will track th…