Call For Grant Proposals In Perl Development 137
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."
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.
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This is an awesome idea, can I implement the project in Python ;)
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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.
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2. If you're trying to use perl on IIS, you shouldn't be using perl.
3. Well, alright, I'll agree there.
4. !!!!
5. I'd like to place a vote for
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:Wishlist (Score:4, Informative)
1) Better tools... improve EPIC. Perl lacks a good IDE.
Activestate's Komodo is a pretty decent IDE.
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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.
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.
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You would if you knew anything about perl. In fact you probably would if you knew anything about software -- betting the farm on something that's barely out the door isn't a very bright move.
As for the second system effect, you're probably correct to some extent, but the solution to that isn't "ship perl 6", the solution is to point out that it's silly FUD -- the perl 5 project is going st
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I think the moderators missed the humor in your post.
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Perl6 has potential.
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Perl 5's object system came from Python. See Larry Wall's Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting [perl.com]:
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Ha. You speak as if there were only one. (I wish). Multiple different ways of implementing Objects exist in the perl 5 world, and there are many, many new attempts at fixing perceived limitations of the earlier styles. You've got your choice of Moose, Object::InsideOut, Class::InsideOut, and so on.
Whether this is a symptom of perl's glorious diversity or a lack of sane standardization, is of course open to question.
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Simple: A program is well-formed Perl 5, if the Perl v5.10.0 interpreter doesn't give you any error for it. The semantics of a Perl 5 program is defined by the behaviour exhibited when run on the Perl v5.10.0 interpreter. :-)
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Perl has a very throughly set of regression tests. That's better than a spec.
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?
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Yeah. That's what ed is for.
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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.
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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?
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Oh yeah, I've heard of it. Try using vi. To edit python files.
He he.
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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.
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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.
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http://www.wxwidgets.org/
http://wxperl.sourceforge.net/
Is a likely solution.
Is it that you did not know about this,
or that you did know and found it wanting?
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Parrot SDL is also quite interesting in this context.
http://www.wgz.org/chromatic/talks/parrot_sdl/index.html
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Having to install a metric boatload of modules and runtime on the clients system everytime you deploy an application gets old fast.
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thats because its designed to be interpreted.
perlcc does produce binary output though
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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.
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.
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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]
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Heard of vi? lighttpd?
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
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Do you write perl projects in Visual studios? If so, please let me know your setup (visual perl, etc), if not, STFU.
Perhaps not all (there may be plugins I'm not aware of) but most of what you mentioned exists in VI either inherent or through plugins (refactoring, file management, and version control integration, even intellisense). Granted, some of these aren't as feature rich implementations, but they are there. It also sports some features that VS does not have, like more advanced code folding, more l
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> 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.
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5) Create a branch in CPAN called Ponies::*. There are many libraries for ponies such as Ponies::Little or Ponies::Fast
and Ponies::OMG
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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?
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What's so cool about a 4 digit id?
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4 is the smallest composite number.
BTW, are you a numeric co-processor? :-)
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no, that's only for three-digiters and better.
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?
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Then try
perl -e '$foo = [[3]]'
Pretty much the same thing.
['arrays', ['inside', 'other'], 'arrays', ['are', 'possible', ['in', 'Perl'], 'too']];
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ruby -e 'foo = [[3]]'
perl -e '$foo = [[3]]'
See -- ruby is superior, equivalent code is 8% shorter!
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emacs and vim aren't the same. Syntax coloring and auto-indentation are only 10% of what makes an IDE useful.
Hmmm. (Score:2)
You mean emacs? *cough*
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No, you'll see, Duke Nukem Forever will be written in Perl 6, at least the Hurd version.
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.
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House of glue (Score:1, Interesting)
Perl is the best glue there is. It works on everything. Still, I would not build a house out of glue.
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Perl is the best glue there is. It works on everything. Still, I would not build a house out of glue.
I thought we were still talking about ponies for a second...
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And C is the best engine. It outperforms anything. I would not build a house out of engine.
A language is not limited by its most compelling feature(s).
Re:House of glue -- why not? (Score:2)
here's a better idea (Score:1, Insightful)
someone should make a bullshit undocumented language with fucked up syntax and call it "Eels".
then someone else can use it to make a bullshit framework for lazy fucks called Hovercraft.
Guess how many lines it takes in Ruby?
Does that include the lines to take the cock out of your mouth or not?
Greatly exagerated demise (Score:1)
I think this hackneyed PERL is dead rhetoric is finally starting to annoy me. Is the current development direction moving away from PERL as a language for web development? Absolutely. I find myself using PERL for basic tasks I don't feel like writing code for in say C# or Java because it is annoying to do so and I can do it in a few lines in PERL. So the purpose of the language has changed dramatically and at the same time not at all, since that usage is pretty much at the heart of PERL's origins.
I say t
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> Stop writing Perl as PERL please, it hurts my eye.
The cyclops has spoken!
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He's probably posting from his MAC.
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No I just always learned that Perl (if it makes you all feel better) stood for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister...
I was obviously wrong. Since it was chosen at random.
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What's supposed to be missing? There's around 300 hits on CPAN if you search for DBD [cpan.org].
Worth $500? (Score:1, Funny)
print "Hello, world!\n";
How much will I get for this?
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Sorry, your program hard-coded the path of perl. That disqualified it. I'm going to get the $500 instead with the following masterpiece:
SCNR
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.
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Complaining about the long wait for Perl 6 is so 2003!
In the mean time the core Perl developers have been busy designing and building the programming language (and runtime environment) of the future.
2009 is the year to start getting excited about Perl 6 again!
For anyone paying attention, things have been really starting to come together in the last year.
- Parrot [parrot.org] is nearing 1.0 production release (in March 2009)!
- Perl 6 on Parrot [rakudo.org] (Rakudo) works and gets new features added every day (see recent note [rakudo.org] say
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?
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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.
Re:Just finish Perl 6 fer kreissakes (Score:2, Interesting)
No one's suggesting you do so for Perl 6 right now. Ask again later this year.
Perl 5 is 14 years old, and its language design still isn't frozen. Almost every question of language design in the past year regarding Perl 6 has come from the implementors, whether
The first thing that came to my mind.... (Score:1)
when I read this post was the Ministry of Silly Walks and their grants, I don't know why :-P
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
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SOAP::Lite IS a sorry mess..
Definately what you say is true about how replacing it with something that actually works would be the gift that keeps giving to Perl.
There are alot of crap perl modules on CPAN with the word SOAP in the title. What a pity, because they do so much damage. A typical perl coder used to glancing at CPAN to see if there is an module available tells his boss, "Yep we can do SOAP," confident in the general high quality of CPAN modules thus far encountered. Then after spending wee
Logic/Constraint Web Programming? (Score:2)
Maybe the future will be something more along the lines of Nomadic Pict, or Mozart/Oz or maybe some new experimental linear logic programming language seemingly a perfect fit for exchanging web resources over the internet.
I'm intruiged. In general about the potential of logic programming languages (I'd love to replace SQL with Prolog in a number of contexts), and specifically about your proposition, but I'm not sure I see how constraint/logic programming is the perfect fit for web services. Can you elaborat
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Lemme preface that I am not an expert at logic programming but it is what intrigues me at the moment. I'll try and explain why it intrigues me, and why I want to learn more. I'm not saying the following is true, but I will try to convey why I am curious about it.
Web services are potentially distributed over many places. The coolest stuff I've seen with regards to distributed programming is with logic programming languages.
Forget openness for a minute and read this: http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentat [mozart-oz.org]
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So, make something better.
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Indeed. If I had the time and resources.
Unfortunately, time is something I don't have these days.
Which is why I bothered posting this. I hope someone who does have the time will pick it up and run with it.
Proposal (Score:2)
Open Source Porting (Score:1)
I'm asking my sources for pointers to the some nice government-paid-for-it-so-we-own-it-right? Space Shuttle source code. Or some nice ICBM or IRBM or ABM firmware, that would do. Cruise missile? Cell phone GPS? Whatever.
Knock out a quick proposal for porting to perl (if it isn't written in perl already, that is), and off we go!
explain.pl program.pl (Score:2)
Static Tree Analysis for Refactoring? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone?
You've already got the help - CPAN (Score:1)
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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
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I received [perlfoundation.org] a Perl Foundation grant in 2007 -- $2000 for about 80 hours of work. That's not a very good rate for an experienced engineer in the USA, but for me the money was not just a carrot but also a stick. I knew that failing my project would be a very public humiliation. It was work I wanted to do anyway, but I had procrastinated it in my free time. The deadline and publicity made me finish it. So, IMO it's the acceptance of the grant that's a significant source of motivation, not the completion.
If it w
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.
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.
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I get paid $50/hr for VB.NET stuff. (Northeast PA) There ARE still quite a few of VB6 to .NET port projects around, so don't give up hope just yet. And in most cases, you won't need to change too much. VB8(.NET 2.0) has a lot of legacy backward compatibilities built into the language to allow for VB6-style coding practices. And .NET2.0+ are much nicer to work with than 1.1, as with most M$ releases, you want to wait until the second service pack or version.
The .NET framework isn't difficult to understand or
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US$35/hr to code in VB? I'm going to have to assume the benefits were good. Something along the lines of, "Location: Strip Club". I can think of no other plausible reason to subject yourself to that pain for so little money.
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where!? any more jobs?
just kidding. good for you. i'm sure you're not alone in making a good living from perl. it still works, headache-inducing syntax and all.
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like?
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Since when is Perl dead?
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Perl is not dead, Parrot is. Though I've heard it might in fact be just resting.
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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.