Slashdot Log In
Call For Grant Proposals In Perl Development
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Jan 12, 2009 09:56 PM
from the sand-in-the-oyster dept.
from the sand-in-the-oyster dept.
On Elpeleg writes "The Perl Foundation is giving out grants for Perl development ranging from $500 to $3,000 in February 2009. You neither need to have a large, complex, or lengthy project nor be a Perl master or guru. You are encouraged to submit a proposal if you have a good idea and the means and ability to accomplish your Perl project. The deadline for proposal submissions is January 31, 2009."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Rules and Regulations (Score:5, Funny)
Your proposal must be submitted in the form of a self-aware regular expression with at least 200 backreferences.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
C doesn't have any "built in functions", that I'm aware of. It's got a standard library, yeah, but no "built ins". It's a pedantic issue of semantics, but it's technically true.
Wishlist (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Better tools... improve EPIC. Perl lacks a good IDE.
2) Get perl running on IIS using ISAPI (basically, mod_perl for IIS).
3) Either finish Perl6 or give up. Nobody cares about the CLR thing, give us Perl6 the language. The delay in shipping Perl6 is killing the language.
4) ????
5) Create a branch in CPAN called Ponies::*. There are many libraries for ponies such as Ponies::Little or Ponies::Fast.
Re:Wishlist (Score:4, Informative)
1) Better tools... improve EPIC. Perl lacks a good IDE.
Activestate's Komodo is a pretty decent IDE.
Parent
Re:Wishlist (Score:5, Informative)
Perl is dead, Netcraft confirms it.
But seriously, why does it make perl any less viable a language if a production-quality perl 6 takes a long time? Perl 5 continues to be lovingly maintained. Perl 6 will be able to run perl 5 modules in compatibility mode. Perl 6 is already out, and if you want to use it, you can; it's just not yet up to the same very high standards of quality and performance as perl 5.
Parent
It matters because it creates uncertianty. (Score:2)
If you were starting a new project would you base it on Perl5 when you aren't sure Perl6 is just around the corner? No offense to anybody, but Perl6 is a classic example of the second system syndrome and serves as an excellent reminder of why it is never a good idea to rewrite code. While they were busy rewriting code, PHP, Ruby and Python cleaned their lunch.
It isn't out until I read about its release on Arstechnica and Slashdot.
Re:Wishlist (Score:4, Funny)
1) Better tools... improve EPIC. Perl lacks a good IDE.
Why would you need an IDE to write a single line of code?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah. That's what ed is for.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1) EPIC sucks, and so does Eclipse. Try ActiveState Komodo, but they half ass it anyway. Perl does need a good IDE.
2) Download ActiveState perl, set PerlISAPI.dll as the handler for your pl or cgi files, done. It's free, too.
3) Shut the hell up. Have you seen the amount of progress on Rakudo lately? Pugs, the reference implementation of Perl6, has been around for a while. The real thing, the real working thing, is in development and you can play with it and actually write scripts now.
4) Eat crap.
5) What.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
1) Better tools... improve EPIC. Perl lacks a good IDE
Have you seen Padre?. [perlide.org] A Perl IDE written in Perl.
Re:Wishlist (Score:4, Insightful)
My Perl IDE is called XEmacs. Perhaps you've heard of it?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
My Perl IDE is called XEmacs. Perhaps you've heard of it?
I agree that emacs is still the sensible choice; either that or setting the universal constants [xkcd.com], which I understand works well for some [xkcd.com] people.
Re: (Score:2)
A standard cross-platform GUI library; perl is eminently suited for GUI work but we still have to make do with an interface to GTK. I know this isn't the nineties anymore, but GUI work still has a place.
Dead on with the perl6 thing. Continue with it, but call it something else. And produce perl6 with new and improved classes and runtime-context-free grammars and regexes without a VM.
Re: (Score:2)
Having to install a metric boatload of modules and runtime on the clients system everytime you deploy an application gets old fast.
Hmmm... (Score:2)
I agree with you on this. I've yet to see a really good "best practices for perl deployment".
That said, wait until you deploy a PHP application only to find that PHP wasn't compiled with some feature you were using. Good times.
Re: (Score:2)
I've used pp and it worked well enough for me. Of course if you have binary modules you need to build them on a platform that's compatible with the intended destination.
http://search.cpan.org/~smueller/PAR-Packer-0.982/lib/pp.pm [cpan.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Even on a trivial program it generates several gigabytes of intermediate files. I have tried to compile a normal project once, and when it wasn't done yet after about four days I've stopped this madness.
Re: (Score:2)
> 1) Better tools... improve EPIC. Perl lacks a good IDE.
Padre [perlide.org] is improving in leaps and bounds so that problem should hopefully be gone soon.
Re: (Score:2)
Now hang on just a second. You've got a 4-digit ID. Aren't you supposed to be sitting atop some mountain, impervious to cold and clime, telling all those dedicated enough to seek your wisdom how the meaning of all human existence can be expressed in one beautifully simple line of perl?
Re:Wishlist (Score:5, Interesting)
Would it be something like this?
Something like this?
Perhaps it would help if you said which nonsense, specifically, struck you as being onerous?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Then try
perl -e '$foo = [[3]]'
Pretty much the same thing.
['arrays', ['inside', 'other'], 'arrays', ['are', 'possible', ['in', 'Perl'], 'too']];
nonsense (Score:2)
1) Good IDE's like eclipse or Visual Studio make a programmer more productive. They have refactoring tools, they analyze your code and make it easy to track down where stuff is, they parse your comments to provide very useful tooltips that describe function parameters (intellesense). Without such tools, it takes significantly longer to learn how a new project fits together. Just being able to right click on a bit of code that calls a method and say "goto definition" is worth the price alone.
2) Nonsense
Re: (Score:2)
emacs and vim aren't the same. Syntax coloring and auto-indentation are only 10% of what makes an IDE useful.
Vi is not an IDE (Score:2)
Syntax Coloring and auto-indentation is a baseline that every text editor should support. IDE's parse your code and give you useful information about it. They parse your comments (xmldoc for C#) and use them for tooltips. They help you find function declarations. They help you refactor your code. They help manage your files. They integrate into your version control system. And so on.
To go slightly off topic, I think intellesense was the best invention ever. It gives a programmer a very strong incentiv
Proposal requirements (Score:5, Funny)
You neither need to have a large, complex, or lengthy project nor be a Perl master or guru.
You do, however, have to be able to fit it all on one line.
Re: (Score:2)
Finish Perl 6 or give up (Score:3, Insightful)
The delay in releasing Perl 6 ( shut up with the idiot mantra, "It'll be ready when it's ready" ) has done more to kill off the language than any other factor.
New scripters have taken up Python or Ruby. Old timers have got frustrated at the philosophical debate about what it means to 'release' a language. Some of the people involved with the project appear to be having a bit of a laugh at the expense of the coders who have been using the language. No goals, no milestones. Some airy fairy notion that it will never be complete. The PR job alone has been a total disaster.
It would have been better not to mention Perl 6 until it was ready - haven't you Perl people learnt the lesson about announcing the next product before it is ready for sale and while you still have the old product to shift?
If a stable version of Perl 6 is not released in 2009 then Perl will be left dead in the water. That may already have been the case for some time.
Just finish Perl6 fer kreissakes (Score:2)
Re:Just finish Perl6 fer kreissakes (Score:4, Informative)
The primary reason for the longevity of the Perl 6 development effort is shortage of volunteers. To put it harshly, people like you spend their energy complaining instead of helping.
The money is most certainly well-spent on both Perl 5 and Perl 6. I was a Perl Foundation grant recipient to work on Perl::Critic, a static analysis tool and code quality aid. My contributions are making a positive influence to help with the readability, maintainability and portability of large Perl 5 codebases. (read TFA and you'll see my name mentioned) Perl::Critic is being actively used in improving the Parrot codebase.
What have you done to help?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The Rakudo spectest chart [rakudo.de] has daily updates of exactly that.
Re:Just finish Perl6 fer kreissakes (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?development_dashboard [perlfoundation.org] that seems to have some goals. But still "Language Definition" is on the todo list. And "Language Definition" seems a pretty big item to me, as changes in that can change the tests. Not only that, would you write a bunch of code in a language knowing that at any moment it could be invalidated by a few small tweaks? I wouldn't, not production code at least.
They have some other things like the command line (deciding what it is, then implementing it), deciding what the installation package is, etc.. But still until the language design is frozen, you will never be done. And if a major change is made that results totally rebuilding the architecture you could end up throwing a lot of work away.
This todo list seems more like a brainstorm. Really what is needed is someone like Larry Wall to finish his documentation, then someone to write tests based on the Perl 6 language design (In Perl 6) and then passing those tests can become a chart to Perl 6. Although there will still be issues such as installation package, converting modules in CPAN and getting it working with Perl6, etc... But the most important thing is to get the language down. Then people will start playing with it to get a jump on learning Perl 6. And once the language is finalized it can start to be used in some corporate settings as a piece of beta software.
Most likely the real Perl 6 revolution won't come until CPAN (or some other entity like it) is made for Perl 6 and has some of the more useful modules (like DBI among others). Right now a large part of Perl's value is CPAN and the various modules available. That is another project that cannot even really fully start until after the language is finalized.
Parent
Real webservices toolkit (Score:2, Insightful)
What is killing perl (at least at my job) is it's lack of a proper, modern, standards compliant webservices toolkit.
SOAP::Lite is a sorry mess. It's *simply amazing* that it works *at all*. I've tried to scratch that itch to fix it so many times, but the internals of SOAP::Lite are so *incredibly* convoluted, that it's damn near impossible.
Perl needs a completely new SOAP toolkit, with real WSDL support for all the different document modes.
That ONE thing will keep perl entrenched deep in the guts of the cor
Re: (Score:2)
So, make something better.
Proposal (Score:2)
explain.pl program.pl (Score:2)
Static Tree Analysis for Refactoring? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Pointless motivating with small money (Score:3, Insightful)
That means you're really going to be doing it for the honor. In that case forget the money and rather make a "hall of fame", something like: http://armlinux.simtec.co.uk/whoswho.html [simtec.co.uk] . That's worth more for a good consultant and costs al
Re:That isn't enough $$$ (Score:5, Interesting)
Six figure salaries for a programmer is a sign of doom for the language. Nobody else is willing to do your job because the rest of the world has moved on. If only I could have my days as a $35/hr. VB 6.0 programmer back.
Parent
I thought it meant you lived in NY/California? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some places DO seem to pay that kind of money. Or the GP lied. Or the really is good (the Perl world has some really smart and interesting people).
The real problem for Perl is the bad hype, which your tro... hrm, guessing without facts, is a typical example of.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
like?
Re: (Score:2)
Since when is Perl dead?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Perl is not dead, Parrot is. Though I've heard it might in fact be just resting.
Re: (Score:2)
Funnily, that isn't even all too off-topic in a discussion on perl. But I'm not for it, anyway. I like my camels with a bit of hair.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
> Stop writing Perl as PERL please, it hurts my eye.
The cyclops has spoken!
Re: (Score:2)
He's probably posting from his MAC.