Leo Lapworth

craigslist Fund Donates $100,000 to Perl5

Jan 242012

The Perl Foundation today announced that they have received a donation of $100,000 toward Perl5 maintenance and for general use by the Perl Foundation from the craigslist Charitable Fund.

According to craigslist CEO and former Perl Hacker Jim Buckmaster, “craigslist has gloried in and relied upon Perl for most of its software development for more than a decade. craigslist Charitable Fund is honored to recognize the wizardry and generosity of the Perl community, help ensure the ongoing maintenance of Perl5, and contribute to the future evolution of Perl.” He added, “It was unclear at first how best to give something back to Perl. Fortunately there was more than one way to do it.”

For more information download the PDF Press Releases, or view the news story.

MetaCPAN logo competition announced

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Dec 172011

The MetaCPAN team have announced a competition to design them a logo, the winning entry will get a prize of $400 USD, not to mention having their design used on this great site.

The prize has been provided by the Enlightened Perl Organisation

The deadline is the 13th of January 2012, so make sure to have your laptop with you over the holiday season.

For more information visit http://contest.metacpan.org/ or see the entries so far.

metacpan.org one year old

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Nov 032011

https://metacpan.org/ is a year old today. The site and API have come a long way in just one year and offer a great way to search CPAN either through a browser or the API.

The API is already powering new features in Padre, the Perl IDE as well as an iPhone CPAN app – iCPAN and github meets CPAN website.

There have been a large number of contributors and an ever increase set of features.

Olaf looks back at a few of the more recent updates.

There are still a large number of issues and features which the project wants to add, and they are are always looking for more Volunteers.

Congratulations to all involved.

PrePAN – Perl code review and discussion site launches

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Oct 292011

http://prepan.org/ was recently launched at http://yapcasia.org/2011/ and was announced to the rest of the Perl community by @kentaro.

The site focuses on code review and discussions, with the goal of helping module authors get feedback, suggestions and help before they upload a new module to CPAN.

This is a really interesting idea and is getting lots of use even after having been live for only a couple of days. There are several changes and additions planned for the future, so this is definitely a site to keep an eye on.

Time tracking Perl application

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Oct 292011

App::TimeTracker first presented at YAPC::Europe 2011 has just launched a website to go with the Perl Application.

Developed with Perl and Moose meta programming, as well as a host of other CPAN Modules this project is a really nice example of building a Perl application with todays Perl tools.

Rather than go into the detail of what and how this Perl time tracking application works, have a look at the website http://timetracker.plix.at/ to find out more.

learn.perl.org relaunches, PerlFAQ included

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Sep 272011

http://learn.perl.org/ has been rewritten and relaunched, along with basic step by step guides to installing and using Perl, there are screencasts and some useful examples.

The PerlFAQ (previously hosted at http://faq.perl.org/) is now integrated to the learning website and can be found at http://learn.perl.org/faq/.

There are further changes planned for both the learning website and PerlFAQ in the near future.

Perl 5 Core fund exceeds initial expectations

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Aug 212011

Vienna.pm’s donation of a $10,000 “match funding” to the Perl 5 core maintenance fund, was just a starter, and has lead to an official Grant proposal from Nicholas Clark.

Vienna.pm’s donation has been added to by…

Booking.com: 10,000 USD
cPanel: 10,000 USD
Net-A-Porter: 10,000 USD
Dijkmat: 5,000 USD
Oslo Perl Mongers: 1,000 EUR

Perl 5 core maintenance fund will continue to accept donations to assist with the next round of ongoing improvements to the Perl 5 Core, thus benefiting the whole Perl 5 community.

Learning Perl, 6th Edition is now available

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Jun 262011

The 6th edition of the “Learning Perl”, popularly known as “the Llama”, book is now available. This sixth edition includes recent changes to the language up to Perl 5.14 as well as a major overhaul for Unicode.

Reflecting years of classroom testing and experience, this edition is packed with exercises that let the reader practice the concepts while following the text.

It is available directly from O’Reilly Media, it’s in Safari Books Online, as well as to pre order from other book sellers such as Amazon.

Order your colleges a copy today!

Perl 5.14.0 Release Candidate 2 now available for testing

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May 042011

The second release candidate for Perl 5.14.0 is available for download from CPAN.

Since RC1:

Fixed a regression related to Unicode and character classes reported by George Greer
Muzzled several tests that hang on a variety of platforms
Fixed a typo that caused build problems with the vendor compiler on Solaris x86_64
Documented several new features that had previously been undocumented

While Perl5-Porters go to great lengths to ensure that new versions of Perl don’t break existing programs, it does happen. It’s really, really important that all unintentional breakages are caught before the final release of Perl 5.14.0.

As always, don’t get rid of your old perl before you know your stuff works with the new one.

If no “showstopper” class bugs are found in the next 7 days, Perl5-Porters will release a virtually identical tarball as Perl 5.14.0 on Wednesday, May 11.