maraist writes: "Larry Wall's Altanta Linux Showcase Talk on Perl 6 is now available. Highlights: Perl will be interpreted by Perl (syntax can look like any language), variables will be more localized and OO, more support of both low level and high level constructs, and the core will be streamlined."

Use Perl is reporting that Damian Conway has been sponsored by several companies and individuals (most impressively Black Star who donated half of the needed $55k). Now Damian can continue working on amazing perl projects like Quantum::Superpositions and Lingua::Romana::Perligata for the next year! Malicose noted that Damian sponsor page explains a bit more too.

Okay, here (as a refreshing break from all the political stuff) is what amounts to one of the most lucid primers on software development management I've ever seen, contained in NEdit leader Mark Edel's answers to your questions. If you ever expect to lead an Open Source project (or a closed source one, for that matter), you need to read this from start to finish, possibly even print out a copy and read it over and over. Great stuff!

A technical book with personality? Chromatic claims just that in his review of Linux Graphics Programming with SVGAlib. If you're a graphics guru, or are looking for a book that describes a lot of the low level functions that put pretty pictures on your screen, this one sounds like one you should at least consider.

jilles writes "I found this article at infoworld. Apparently some company executive of Sun was caught saying that SUN Microsystems is moving toward making its Java technology fully open-source."

Sarek asks: "I work in a mostly Windows environment at work writing ASP but I much prefer PHP. While I seem to have convinced the powers that be that PHP is better, there is only one hurdle I can't seem to overcome to get them to start writing in PHP. I can't seem to find a debugging environment for PHP like there is for ASP. While I'm perfectly happy writing without it I have seen a great many benefits to having one, such as faster debugging. Has anyone thought to make one yet? And if so where can I find it? For those of you that don't know ASP uses MS InterDev. Which in short allows you to debug ASP just like you would debug a compiled language, by setting breakpoints, stepping through the code, etc..."

Bill Phu asks: "I just had an idea for an interesting open source and/or freeware add-on (for a commercial package). While on the crappy bus ride to work this morning, I just realized that car-pooling would be a much better idea, but finding people to carpool with is a pain in the butt. But the chances of someone living near you increases if the organization (e.g. company or university) is larger. Wouldn't it be great if there was a tool to help you find people to carpool with?" Read on for the details on this idea and tell us what you think.

tjansen asks: "While looking into the GTK library, I notice that there are a large number of GTK bindings for scripting languages: Perl, Python, JavaScript, Guile...almost every language has its own GTK binding with its own syntax that all have to be maintained (and documented) separately. The same problem exists for all C or C++ based libraries, writing wrappers for scripting languages is just a lot of work. On Windows systems COM is used to make libraries and components accessible to scripting languages. Even if the COM interface does not fit very well to a particular language, for example because they don't use the language's naming convention, they give even obscure languages a great amount of libraries with almost no work other than writing ActiveScripting bindings for the language. Why maintain separate bindings when the community could use something like CORBA for the same thing? I think the idea is too obvious and something like this should be very useful for language interoperability in general. Is anyone working on such a project?"

Justin Goldberg writes: "I saw this article over on Linuxtoday about Internet C++, a new language that will bring standard languages and APIs, as well as current applications, to the Internet. Doom has already been ported to Internet C++, as well as X Galaga and Tetris. IDoom (the name of the Doom port) runs pretty jumpy on my machine running X on FreeBSD, but the release is in alpha stage." The reader forums on the site are pretty interesting, too, in discussing whether this is a truly (Free / Open Source) language, and about the extant alternatives.

PullingMyHairOut asks: "I work for a company that has recently acquired many smaller companies and is now in the process of integrating them. One of the problems we are facing is creating a unified Configuration Management Policy and locating CM tools to implement it. I am personally advocating CVS since, as a developer, I find it very useful and full featured. However, management would like a tool that can: easily be used by suits; supports access control lists on project folders with recursive attributes (top level readonly means all subfolders and files are readonly); supports versioning of documents (MS Word, HTML) as well source; and supports (but is not limited to) RCS-style file checkouts where only a single developer can have a file checked out. I'm pretty sure that using pre- and post-checkin scripts and wrapper programs around CVS (better than WinCVS) can make this work, but we don't have the time to write them. Does anybody know of a CM tool that can do all this? Even if it costs money?"

NEdit is a Linux/Unix "point and click" text editor that gets almost no press but has a dedicated (if small) band of devoted users, including rusty at kuro5hin and myself. We get lots of news about high-profile Open Source and free software projects, but rarely hear about ones like NEdit or the people who lead them -- like Mark Edel, NEdit's original author, who is still the project's integration "gatekeeper." This is a good opportunity for anyone who is thinking about starting a free software project to ask what it's like to toil in the shadow of giants. Please post your questions below. We'll forward about 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Mark tomorrow, and will post his answers next week.

King_B writes: "Interesting perspective on the OSS development model. Is anybody working on a new text editor?" It's an interesting article talking about the development of open source projects, and who joins them, and who starts new projects. Makes one think about the "scratching the itch" comment that's often heard.

bridgette asks: "I'd like to have a good 'javadocs-like' documentation generator for my C/C++ project. I've been looking into Doc++ but I haven't seen any 3rd party reviews. Anyone out there want to share their experiences with Doc++, good bad or otherwise? Anyone know of any alternatives?"

atallah writes: "It would appear that the long awaited Python 2.0 was finally released today. The front page of the Web site has the announcement." According to that announcement, Python 2.0 will receive minor-version updates around every 6 months, even as work begins on the shoot-for-the-moon Python 3000. For the curious, here's the list of what's new in 2.0; the list includes "full XML support and several forms of new syntax," as well as the BeOpen label.

jbc writes: "As discussed over at use Perl, the Perl community is attempting to raise US$55K in donations to support Perl überhacker Damian Conway for a year so he can devote himself to worthwhile pursuits related to Perl development. Thanks to a large donation from an as-yet-unnamed corporate donor, they're apparently already more than halfway there." Update: 10/15 11:31 PM by H : To actually give, go to the YAPC site.

Scott Taylor asks: "I've recently started my own company, and after reading The Pragmatic Programmer, and Unix Power Tools I'm interested in removing the need for Microsoft Word to make my business cards and labels. I would like to use a command line solution. One where I can update a configuration file, run make and out comes a label or business card from the printer. Unfortunately I have little experience with text formatting tools other than LaTeX. What would be the best Unix tool to use to create proper templates for Avery labels. Can it support color and graphics? What about printing to color ink jet printers?"

mulcher asks: "In a beowulf cluster I want to store (logically) one giant data structure across many nodes and have individual nodes compute in parallel. Each node has SMP so I want to exploit that as well. I have seen C/C++ and Message Passing Interface MPI, however I am also looking for Java and Haskell interfaces, or special parallel languages interfaces. Any suggestions? Also is there anyone out there who has attempted this and can recommend some URLs?"

It seems that the latest version of the most popular module for Apache, PHP, has been released as PHP 4.0.3. There are some interesting changes, including some security fixes and extensions in shared memory handling. Of special note are the changes in htmlspecialchars/htmlentities and the ENT_COMPAT mode which allows you to reenable the pre-4.0.2 quote translation matrix. Get yours now!

slashdot-me asks: "The International Obfuscated C Code Contest that we all know and love seems to be stalled. The judging phase of the contest began six months ago in April. Since then all the judges except Leonid Broukis have abandoned the project. Has this 16-year-old programming tradition died?"

Gone Jackal asks: "I've run into a ludicrous situation. I'm a classicist at the University of Chicago, finishing off my undergraduate career with a bachelor's thesis. As part of this, I'm working on poetry and meter in Vergil. Imagine my joy when I found in the library catalogue a 20 volume set of books on just this topic, published between 1973 and 1985. Now imagine my horror when I open up the first volume and see that the entire work is on punch cards. What the heck do I do with punch cards? The CS department has laughed at me, and mainframe computing says they're not allowed to help since I'm not an administrator. Any suggestions on where to go, what to do to read these, or even find out what's on them? (The series title, in case you wanted to know, is 'Metrische Analysen zu Vergil', by Wilhelm Ott. It's in German)." Oh man...punch cards. I can understand Gone Jackal's frustration, however I'm more surprised that such works weren't converted to better media a long time ago.