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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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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Charting Data at the Bottom of the World
I have an odd job: I’m the only programmer for about 500 miles. I look after experiments on a remote Antarctic research station and look after the data they produce. As well as the scientific stuff knocking about, we…
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Perl Design Patterns, Part 3
This is the third (and final) article in a series which form one Perl programmer’s response to the book Design Patterns (also known as the Gang of Four book or simply as GoF, because four authors wrote it). As…
