My Perl Wishlist: Invariant Sigils (Part 1)
The change I would most like to see in Perl 5, and why it might not happen
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New Features of Perl 5.14: Non-destructive Substitution
Perl 5.14 adds non-destructive substitution.
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Visualizing Music with SDL and Perl
In this edited excerpt from the SDL Perl manual, lead developer Kartik Thakore walks through a non-game application of SDL and Perl, building a music player with visualizations in just a few lines of code.
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Welcome Rakudo Star
The first Rakudo Star release is out, making Perl 6 available to a wider range of users. Welcome to the new era of Perl.
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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…
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A Website in a Minute Using Dancer, the Effortless Web Framework
While Perl has a few heavy hitters in the web framework world (Catalyst, Jifty, CGI::App), sometimes they can seem like overkill. When writing a light web service or a high-end but not-as-complex website, you might want something smaller and simpler….
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Testing Perl 5.12.0 RC 1 with App::perlbrew
I’m working on a project with Curtis “Ovid” Poe and Adrian Howard. We use Perl 5.10.1, but because we control which version of Perl 5 we use, there’s no reason not to test with Perl 5.12.0 - and if we…
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perl5i Makes More Simple Things Simple
Suppose that you want to load a module dynamically (you have the name in a scalar), then alias a function from that module to a new name in another class. In other words, you want a renaming import. How do…
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Idioms, or How to Write Perlish Perl
Any language—programming or natural—develops idioms, or common patterns of expression. The earth revolves, but we speak of the sun rising or setting. We talk of clever hacks and nasty hacks and slinging code. We ping each other on IRC to…
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More Code, Less Cruft: Managing Distributions with Dist::Zilla
Every software distribution is a bunch of files written and maintained by programmers. The files are of three types: code, documentation, and crap—though this distinction is too subtle. Much of the documentation and code is crap, too. It’s pointless. It’s…
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Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting...
I think, to most people, scripting is a lot like obscenity. I can’t define it, but I’ll know it when I see it. Here are some common memes floating around: Simple language “Everything is a string” Rapid prototyping Glue…
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Everyday Perl 6
Perl 6 will soon be here. How will programming in Perl 6 be different from programming in Perl 5 for your average Perl programmer? The answer is: very different yet very much the same. A Perl 6 program viewed…
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The State of the Onion 10
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…
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The State of the Onion
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…
