Inside Perl 5.12
Perl 5.12 has just come out. A rejuvenated development process helps ensure a bright future for Perl as it enters its third decade of making easy things easy and hard things possible. Here’s what you can expect when you upgrade…
Perl 5.12 has just come out. A rejuvenated development process helps ensure a bright future for Perl as it enters its third decade of making easy things easy and hard things possible. Here’s what you can expect when you upgrade…
brian d foy is the author of Mastering Perl, now available in its second edition, as well as several other Perl books. As the founder of Perl mongers, he’s been active in the Perl community for almost 20 years. Ever…
For Perl’s 20th anniversary, several Perl programmers reflect on their experiences with the language.
Welcome to the tenth State of the Perl Onion. For those of you who are unfamiliar with my methods, this is the annual speech wherein I ramble on about various things that are only marginally related to the state…
Accurate software inventory management is critical to any organization. Without an accurate software inventory, organizations may either be out of compliance with their vendor licensing agreements or they may be paying extra for licenses that they do not need….
For the last couple of years, we’ve been homeschooling our two youngest kids. Gloria has been making sure they learn the easy subjects like history and mathematics. I’ve been making sure they also learn the hard subjects like, um,…
An interview with Richard Dice, who helped organize Perl’s YAPC::NA 2005 in Toronto.
An interview with long-time Perl programmer and author, brian d foy. His book Mastering Perl recently came out in its second edition.
Sometimes data processing is better when separated into different processes that may run on the same machine or even on different ones. This is the well-known client-server technique. You can do it using a known protocol (such as http)…
Imagine a city protected by a small army of soldiers. The city’s future growth requires a larger force; so a few determined lieutenants go to nearby towns and enlist aid from their police departments. These forces will come to the…
In the summer of 2001, the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB) hired a new Provost. She surveyed various school services and came up with a short list of must-do projects. Given the level of competition in…
Note: All comments in square brackets are X screensavers that I ran for my slides. If you want to play along at home, start up xscreensaver-demo and click on the screensaver named. By the way, for any screensaver that…
After the keynotes, the most popular sessions at most Perl conferences tend to be the lightning talks. Each session consists of about 10 to 15 lightning talks — talks typically lasting individually no more than five minutes — back…
Recently, Perl trainer and former perl.com editor Mark-Jason Dominus revived his Quiz of the Week mailing list; every week, subscribers are sent a Perl task of either “regular” or “expert” level. There are no prizes, but the submitted solutions are…
This week, perl.com has the pleasure of interviewing Allison Randal, one of the key figures in the Perl community. Allison has been active in the Perl 6 design process since its inception, and is the President of the Perl…
A colleague of mine recently asked me about Perl’s future. Specifically, he wondered if we have any tricks up our sleeves to compete against today’s two most popular platforms: .NET and Java. Without a second’s hesitation, I repeated the…
Slim Devices made their name in 2001 with the SLIMP3, a networked MP3 and Internet radio player. The SLIMP3 won a five-out-of-five mouse rating in Macworld magazine, and was featured in GQ magazine and on TechTV’s The Screen Savers….
First, a disclaimer. I’m not a wiki celebrity. I don’t look good in StudlyCaps. I’m not part of the wiki culture — I’ve never contributed to Ward’s Wiki, never used TWiki, am baffled by MoinMoin, and every time I…
We use Perl for all kinds of things. Web development, data munging, system administration, even bioinformatics; most of us have used Perl for one of these situations. A few people use Perl for building end-user applications with graphical user…
This is the 7th annual State of the Perl Onion speech, wherein I tell you how Perl is doing. Perl is doing fine, thank you. Now that that’s out of the way, I’d like to spend the rest of…