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…

Approximately 25 tickets were reviewed, and 3 patches were applied. ``` [Hours] [Activity] 0.83 #12957 review discussion (mentioned in #19182), review sdbm source, comment 1.27 #18958 look over code #18958 review code and comment #18958 comment 1.59 #19020 research - should the shell be trapping in this case? haven’t found anything appropriate, also look at dash source #19020 more dash source, comment 2.74 #19121 research and comment #19121 re-work #19121 consider alternative for the delimiter, looking over code #19121 look at a :crlf issue - is it a problem elsewhere cpan #133233 0.30 #19122…

The Grants Committee has concluded voting on the November 2021 round. One grant request was submitted:

VOTING RESULTS: Approved. 4 YES votes (14 points), 0 NO votes, 1 ABSTAIN

We accept proposals throughout the year; our next round of review will begin in January. You can submit proposals at any time.

If you want to help with funding and increase our budget, please visit our donations page. We sincerely appreciate all the donors which make the grant program possible. If you donate, please take advantage of you…

FOSDEM will run online on 5-6 February 2022 and is calling for participation. The Marketing Committee would like to run a Perl dev room (basically a talk track), but need volunteers and speakers to assist.

Talks need to be prerecorded and uploaded prior to the conference, which are then streamed to participants with Q&A after each.

Before we request the room from FOSDEM and call for speakers, we need volunteers to assist with both organizing and supporting speakers.

We need 2-3 people who can meet regularly and spend time planning it, encouraging calls for papers, helping speakers record their ta…

Daniel Sockwell has provided two updates to his Grant: Persistent Data Structures for Raku.

The first update was already submitted in October, and not posted due to my own error. Enjoy the thorough description!

In September, I spent 28 hours on implementing Raku persistent data structures. That's a bit under the 10 hour/week I'd estimated that I'd spend, but I was still able to make a good start on the implementation.

The main reason I didn't spend the full 40 hours on the grant – as well as the explanation for why you're getting this…

(from Jonathan Worthington)

During September, I completed the remaining hours on my current grant. The key aim of the grant - to bring my work on a new generalized dispatch mechanism to the point where it could be merged and delivered to Raku users - has been achieved, the merge taking place on 29th September. I wrote a blog post that provides some data on the improvements, as well as identifying future work that can build upon what has been achieved thus far.

During September, working under the grant, I:

• Implemented specialization and inlining of dispatches that store resume initialization state…

Optimizations building upon the new Raku dispatch mechanism

Jonathan Worthington

Recently a new dispatch mechanism was merged into MoarVM, along with changes to Rakudo to make use of it. This led to a number of performance improvements in the immediate, and incidentally fixed various long-standing bugs. This is, however, just the start of what can be achieved with the new dispatch architecture and the changes made to the runtime as part of implementing it. This grant application requests funding to help deliver further improvements unlocked by that work.

I'll stop reminding you that... I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I AM DOING.

If you want to start reading from the beginning. Check out the first article in this series

Well, at it's core, ANSI Game Engine is a very colourful and interactive telnet server.

Why telnet!?

I know, right!? I still ask myself the same question today, but at this point, I'm kinda committed. Initially, it all came down to my decision NOT to code the client side. I looked into it, and it just wasn't something I wanted to do. And honestly, it seemed too far outside my comfort level with Perl. I feel much more com…

If you want to start reading from the beginning. Check out the first article in this series

Continuing on with the last article let's talk about changing system architecture and how that can affect Perl code, specifically Storable.

• Mouse Input Support
• Hardware Failure
• Server Upgrade
• UEFI vs OpenSuSE Installer
• 32bit -> 64bit & Perl's Storable

After the old server had HDD failures and finally managing to upgrade to the new server, I eagerly began getting all the services and software installed to test the engine on new hardware. I was quickl…

I'm still learning so remember... I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I AM DOING.

If you want to start reading from the beginning. Check out the first article in this series

Continuing on with the last article let's talk about old hardware with UEFI. It can be difficult (for me) to know how to get Linux OpenSuSE installed properly.

• Mouse Input Support
• Hardware Failure
• Server Upgrade
• UEFI vs OpenSuSE Installer
• 32bit -> 64bit & Perl's Storable

The last server's hard drive died, and I happen to have this old, but better, computer. It was in pieces, sitting in a box for a long…

Remember... I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I AM DOING.

Continuing from the last article, let's talk about the hardware failures and server upgrade.

• Mouse Input Support
• Hardware Failure
• Server Upgrade
• UEFI vs OpenSuSE Installer
• 32bit -> 64bit & Perl's Storable

Ugh, seeing these sort of log errors screams panic to me

Nov 25 03:44:25 Dev smartd[627]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], Self-Test Log error count increased from 3 to 4
Nov 25 03:44:25 Dev smartd[627]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], previous self-test completed with error (read test element)
Nov 25 03:44:25 Dev smartd[627]: Devi…

These are some answers to the Week 141 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 5, 2021 at 24:00). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Write a script to find lowest 10 positive integers having exactly 8 divisors.

Example:

24 is the first such number having exactly 8 divisors.
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 and 24.

This is quite straight forward. We can look at consecutive integers, cou…

A casual remark about closures which I made in My Favorite Warnings: redefine touched off a long off-topic exchange with Aristotle that I thought ought to be promoted to a top-level blog entry. The big thing I learned was that any Perl subroutine can be a closure. The rest of this blog will try to make clear why I now believe this. The words are my own, as are any errors or misconceptions.

The second sentence of Wikipedia's definition of a closure says "Operationally, a closure is a record storing a function together with an environment." This makes it sound a lot like an object, and therefore…

[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…

Hi there

Did you participate in Hacktoberfest 2021?

If not then you have one more chance to participate in the global event 24 Pull Requests. Participation is simple, you just have to submit one pull request each day between 1st Dec 2021 and 24th Dec 2021. It is one of my favourite events. I have participated in the event each year, without a break, since 2015. I was introduced to it by Neil Bowers. Last year I was going through rough patch so, unfortunately, I had to skip it. My best performance was in the year 2018 when I contributed 125 pull requests in the first 24 days of December. If I am…

Hi

Really sad news: that David H. Adler, known by many as DHA has passed away. I've included a number of links where people who can express themselves way better than I do say goodbye to him.

In other news the ephemeral miniconf took place this week. You can read about it below.

Lastly, The Weekly Challenge celebrates its first 1000 days. Congratulations to Mohammad Anwar, my co-editor of the Perl Weekly for keeping up with this project!

Enjoy your week!

Hi there

Going back to the editorial of last week's edition of Perl Weekly, it is still there in my head raising many questions. It is a universal fact that Perl is no longer the favourite language among the youths in college these days. I remember when I was first introduced to Perl in 1999, it was the most popular language. Being a Perl fan, I feel it is my responsibility to bring Perl back to the discussion table. One way to do that is to talk about Perl-based projects and share them with the users of other languages. I have noticed that not as many people blog about Perl as they used to in…

Hi

The Perl Weekly newsletter is more than 10 years old and over those years we have witnessed a huge decline in the number and diversity of posts. There are still a few people who write about Perl regularly, The Weekly Challenge of Mohammad generates many posts, but in general we see fewer and fewer posts.

I wonder, do those people who used to write about Perl write about other technologies or have they just stopped? How come that so few people write about Perl? Are there no new things in Perl? Are there no new problems that one solves in Perl?

I know that writing about stuff is not the same thi…

Hi there

The headline of this week's newsletter is dedicated to all my German friends. However, the message is global "Good bye Hacktoberfest". I don't know the language, so I asked Google to help me. I am sure you all celebrated the month-long festival with loads of contributions to many opensource codebases. I can completely understand the feeling at the end of the month. Those who have participated and completed the challenge successfully i.e. submitted at least 4 eligible Pull Requests, should just relax and wait for their FREE gift. Please take November as a break as December will bring in…

Hi there!

A long, long time ago I contributed a few Perl-related exercises to Exercism, but then for another long time I only recommended it, but didn't use it myself. Recently I returned to it with the hope to use it as a platform to allow my students to practice. I noticed that the Perl track has 62 exercises while many of the other tracks have more. Some of them twice as many.

Have you tried doing the Perl track recently? Are you a mentor on the Perl track? Have you contributed an exercises?

I wonder if it would be a good idea for Mohammad, to post his Weekly challenges as exercises on Exercis…

Advent of Code has started again and I'm again publishing my solutions to github (and probably also here). In the last two years I created on git repo for each year, but this year I changed my mind and want to have on repo containing a dir for each year.

Now I could just copy all the files into the new repo, but that would lose the commit history. Which is unacceptable!

.
├── advent2019
│   ├── 01_1.pl
│   └── 01_2.pl
└── advent2020
    ├── 01_1.pl
    └── 01_2.pl

.
└─── advent_of_code
    ├── 2019
    │   ├── 01_1.pl
    │   └── 01_2.pl
    └── 2020
        ├── 01_1…

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…

I'll stop reminding you that... I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I AM DOING.

If you want to start reading from the beginning. Check out the first article in this series

Well, at it's core, ANSI Game Engine is a very colourful and interactive telnet server.

Why telnet!?

I know, right!? I still ask myself the same question today, but at this point, I'm kinda committed. Initially, it all came down to my decision NOT to code the client side. I looked into it, and it just wasn't something I wanted to do. And honestly, it seemed too far outside my comfort level with Perl. I feel much more c…

If you haven't heard already... I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I AM DOING.

If you want to start reading from the beginning. Check out the first article in this series

Continuing on with the last article let's talk about changing system architecture and how that can affect Perl code, specifically Storable.

• Mouse Input Support
• Hardware Failure
• Server Upgrade
• UEFI vs OpenSuSE Installer
• 32bit -> 64bit & Perl's Storable

After the old server had HDD failures and finally managing to upgrade to the new server, I eagerly began getting all the services and software installed to test the engine on new hardware. I was quickl…

I'm still learning so remember... I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I AM DOING.

If you want to start reading from the beginning. Check out the first article in this series

Continuing on with the last article let's talk about old hardware with UEFI. It can be difficult (for me) to know how to get Linux OpenSuSE installed properly.

• Mouse Input Support
• Hardware Failure
• Server Upgrade
• UEFI vs OpenSuSE Installer
• 32bit -> 64bit & Perl's Storable

The last server's hard drive died, and I happen to have this old, but better, computer. It was in pieces, sitting in a box for a long…

Remember... I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I AM DOING.

Continuing from the last article, let's talk about the hardware failures and server upgrade.

• Mouse Input Support
• Hardware Failure
• Server Upgrade
• UEFI vs OpenSuSE Installer
• 32bit -> 64bit & Perl's Storable

Ugh, seeing these sort of log errors screams panic to me

Nov 25 03:44:25 Dev smartd[627]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], Self-Test Log error count increased from 3 to 4
Nov 25 03:44:25 Dev smartd[627]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], previous self-test completed with error (read test element)
Nov 25 03:44:25 Dev smartd[627]: Devi…

Over the past two years, I’ve gotten back into playing Dungeons & Dragons, the famous tabletop fantasy role-playing game. As a software developer and musician, one of my favorite character classes to play is the bard, a magical and inspiring performer or wordsmith. The list of basic bardic spells includes Vicious Mockery, enchanting verbal barbs that have the power to psychically damage and disadvantage an opponent even if they don’t understand the words. (Can you see why this is so appealing to a coder?)

Mocking has a role to play in software testing as well, in the form of mock objects that s…

To most in the know, coding a game engine with Perl would be a surprise. I've certainly been asked, "Why Perl?". You see, unlike C++, C#, Java and others, which are well established languages in game engine design, Perl is not (well) known for it's role in the development of games. Especially not as a game engine language. You are much more likely to see Perl managing the network infrastructure for the gaming industry then you are to see it powering your favourite video games.

Because It's what I know. It's that simple. I've spent many years using P…

The examples used here are from The Weekly Challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given two decimal-coded binary numbers, $a and $b. Write a script to simulate the addition of the given binary numbers.

use strict;
use warnings;
sub add_binary{
    my($x, $y) = @_;
    my $sum = ""; 
    my @a = reverse(split(//, $x));            
    my @b = reverse(split(//, $y));            
    if(@b > @a){
        my @c = @b;
        @b = @a;
        @a = @c;   
    } 
    my $carry = 0; 
    for(my $d = 0; $d <= @a - 1; $d++){ 
        my $d0 = $a[$d…

The examples used here are from The Weekly Challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given a list of numbers. Write a script to implement JortSort. It should return true/false depending if the given list of numbers are already sorted.

use strict;
use warnings;
use boolean;

sub jort_sort{
    for(my $i=0; $i < @_ - 1; $i++){
        return false if $_[$i + 1] < $_[$i];  
    }  
    return true;
}

MAIN:{
    print jort_sort(1, 2, 3, 4, 5) . "\n";
    print jort_sort(1, 3, 2, 4, 5) . "\n";
}

$ perl perl/ch-1.pl
1
0

Apparently Jort So…

The examples used here are from The Weekly Challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given 2 positive numbers, $m and $n. Write a script to find out if the given two numbers are Two Friendly.

use strict;
use warnings;
use POSIX;
use boolean;

sub euclid {
    my($a, $b) = @_;
    return ($b) ? euclid($b, $a % $b) : $a;
}

sub two_friendly{
    my($m, $n) = @_;
    my $gcd = euclid($m, $n);
    my $p = log($gcd) / log(2);
    return boolean(ceil($p) == floor($p));
}

MAIN:{
    print two_friendly(8, 24). "\n";
    print two_friendly(26, 39). "\n…

The examples used here are from The Weekly Challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given an integer. Write a script find out the middle 3-digits of the given integer, if possible, otherwise show a sensible error message.

use strict;
use warnings;
use POSIX;
sub middle_3{
    my($i) = @_;
    $i = abs($i);
    my $length = length($i);
    return "even number of digits" if $length % 2 == 0;
    return "too short" if $length < 3;
    my $middle = ceil($length / 2);
    return substr($i, $middle - 2, 3);
}

MAIN:{
    print middle_3(1234567) . "\n…

The examples used here are from The Weekly Challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

Write a script to generate first 5 Pandigital Numbers in base 10.

use strict;
use warnings;
##
# Write a script to generate first 5 Pandigital Numbers in base 10.
##
use boolean;

sub first_n_pandigitals {
    my ($n)         = @_;
    my $found       = false;
    my $pandigitals = [];
    my $x           = 1_000_000_000;
    do {
        my $test = $x;
        push @{$pandigitals}, $x
          if ( $test =~ tr/0//d ) > 0
          && ( $test =~ tr/1//d ) > 0…

The examples used here are from The Weekly Challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given an array of positive integers, such that all the numbers appear even number of times except one number. Write a script to find that integer.

use strict;
use warnings;
sub find_odd_occurring{
    my %counts;
    for my $x (@_){
        $counts{$x}++;
    }
    for my $x (keys %counts){
        return $x if $counts{$x} % 2 != 0;
    }
}

MAIN:{
    print find_odd_occurring(2, 5, 4, 4, 5, 5, 2) . "\n";
    print find_odd_occurring(1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1, 4, 4) . "\n…

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…

1. App::Netdisco - An open source web-based network management tool.
   • Version: 2.051005 on 2021-11-25
   • Votes: 13
   • Previous version: 2.051001 was 11 days before
2. App::perlbrew - Manage perl installations in your $HOME
   • Version: 0.93 on 2021-11-22
   • Votes: 167
   • Previous version: 0.92 was 7 months, 7 days before
3. App::Sqitch - Sensible database change management
   • Version: v1.2.0 on 2021-11-20
   • Votes: 38
   • Previous version: v1.1.0 was 1 year, 6 months before
4. Code::TidyAll - Engine for tidyall, yo…

This is the weekly favourites list of CPAN distributions. Votes count: 24

Week's winner: DBD::Pg (+2)

Build date: 2021/11/27 16:53:53 GMT

Clicked for first time:

• Cookie - Cookie Object with Encryption or Signature
• DBIx::Spreadsheet - Query a spreadsheet with SQL
• Dist::Zilla::MintingProfile::AlienBuild - A minimal Dist::Zilla minting profile for Aliens
• Perl::Critic::RENEEB - A collection of handy Perl::Critic policies
• Text::CleanFragment - clean up text to use as URL fragment or filename

Increasing its reputation:

• App::cpanminus (+1=261)
• App::plx (+1=5)
• Coro (+1=72)
• DateTime (+1=204)
• DBD::Pg (+2=87)
• DBI (+1=2…

These are the ten most rated questions at Stack Overflow last week.
Between brackets: [question score / answers count]
Build date: 2021-11-27 15:58:04 GMT

1. Understanding the difference in behaviour between perl's assign-or operator and the combination of assignment and logical-or operators - [3/2]
2. Mojo::UserAgent fails to verify certificate, where LWP::UserAgent succeeds - [2/1]
3. Dump WWW::Curl::Easy request - [2/1]
4. 2-Way-TLS support - [2/0]
5. In Perl, can I put unlimited conditions with the ternary conditional operator? - [1/3]
6. Multiple inheritance - wrong overload selected - [1/3]
7. How can I modify this P…

1. App::Netdisco - An open source web-based network management tool.
   • Version: 2.051001 on 2021-11-14
   • Votes: 13
   • Previous version: 2.050003 was 26 days before
2. Date::Manip - Date manipulation routines
   • Version: 6.86 on 2021-11-15
   • Votes: 16
   • Previous version: 6.85 was 8 months, 14 days before
3. JSON::Validator - Validate data against a JSON schema
   • Version: 5.03 on 2021-11-20
   • Votes: 29
   • Previous version: 5.02 was 1 month, 14 days before
4. MCE - Many-Core Engine for Perl providing parallel pr…

This is the weekly favourites list of CPAN distributions. Votes count: 28

Week's winner: App::sdview (+3)

Build date: 2021/11/20 15:03:15 GMT

Clicked for first time:

• App::BorderStyleUtils - CLI utilities related to border styles
• App::Easer - Simplify writing (hierarchical) CLI applications
• Inline::Filters::Ragel - Run ragel when compiling your Inline modules

Increasing its reputation:

• App::ModuleBuildTiny (+1=10)
• App::Perldoc::Search (+1=2)
• App::perlimports (+1=5)
• App::PrereqGrapher (+1=12)
• App::sdview (+3=4)
• autobox (+1=27)
• autobox::Base64 (+1=3)
• autobox::JSON (+1=4)
• B::C (+1=21)
• cpan::listchanges (+1=12)
• cpan…

1. HTTP::Message - HTTP style message (base class)
   • Version: 6.35 on 2021-11-11
   • Votes: 59
   • Previous version: 6.33 was 4 months, 13 days before
2. IO::Async - Asynchronous event-driven programming
   • Version: 0.800 on 2021-11-11
   • Votes: 65
   • Previous version: 0.79 was 3 months, 6 days before
3. Minion::Backend::SQLite - SQLite backend for Minion job queue
   • Version: v5.0.6 on 2021-11-13
   • Votes: 14
   • Previous version: v5.0.5 was 4 months, 27 days before
4. Moose - A postmodern object system for Perl 5
   • Ve…

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…