The Perl Journal January, 2004
As of December 18, the anniversary of the day in 1987 that Larry Wall released Perl 1.000, Perl is 16 years old. To mark the occasion, Richard Clamp released an updated Perl 1 with support for gcc 3. You can find the new perl-1.0_16 release on CPAN or at http://unixbeard.net/~richardc/perl-1.0_16.tar.gz.
ActiveState also commemorated the day, issuing a press release praising Perl's robustness, rapid development cycle, and enduring popularity. The company said its ActivePerl software had been downloaded 7 million times.
The original man page for Perl 1 described the language as an "interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information." Larry went on to say that Perl "is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal)."
The full Perl Timeline (which begins in 1960, with the invention of hypertext) is at http://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html.
A call for papers has been sent out for the Nordic Perl Workshop, which will be held March 27-28 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Papers about prototyping, testing, optimization, and development with Perl are particularly encouraged. Along with lightning talks and standard talks, the workshop will feature panel talks, where the speaker invites a group of experts to discuss the subject. Submissions are due by February 15; for details see http://perlworkshop.dk/2004/.
Also scheduled for March 27-28 is YAPC::Taipei::2004. "The topic of this conference is 'Projects for Developers,'" writes the conference organizer, Hsin-Chan Chien. "We will unveil 'OpenFoundry,' a collaboration environment based on widely used Perl projects such as Mason, RT, Sympa, and Kwiki." Details will be posted at http://taipei.pm.org/.
Also, proposals for the O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention 2004 will be accepted until February 9. OSCon 2004, which will include the 8th annual Perl Conference, will be held July 26-30 in Portland, Oregon. The call for participation is at http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2004/create/e_sess; for lightning talk proposals, see http://perl.plover.com/lt/osc2004/.
Taiwan's Open Source Software Foundry is conducting a survey of members in the Perl community, "to understand how Taiwan's developers can better communicate and work within international communities." The results of the survey will be used as part of the Taiwanese government's Free Software Promotion Initiative. A final report and guidelines for local developers will be made available in both Chinese and English, and published under a Creative Commons license. The survey questions are listed at http://blog.whiteg.net/survey.html; to participate, mail your answers to whiteg@whiteg.net.
Perthon, a new SourceForge project (http://perthon.sourceforge.net/) led by David Manura, aims to "automatically translate Python into human-readable Perl." It relies on Damian Conway's Parse::RecDescent and Perl regular expressions for the parsing and lexing. Perthon is currently in a 0.1, pre-alpha state; eventually, Manura suggests, it could be useful for running Python code in Perl, easily combining Python and Perl code, or writing Perl programs "using a Pythonic syntactic sugar."
Andy Wardley has secured funding from Fotango, a UK consultancy group, to spend the next few months working full-time on version 3 of the Template Toolkit. For the new version, Andy is working on reorganizing the Template::* module namespace, implementing virtual methods, refactoring the parser, and updating the template compiler. He's also taking feature requests, either through the TT3 mailing list (http://www.template-toolkit.org/ mailman/listinfo/tt3) or the Kwiki (http://www.template-toolkit .org/tt3/kwiki/ttkwiki.cgi).
"The Template Toolkit is a fantastic tool" said Pierre Denis, Development Manager for Fotango, in a prepared statement. "It is fundamental to many of our projects, and with this funding the Template Toolkit will only get better."
The 5.005xx maintainance branch of Perl has a new Pumpking: Leon Brocard, who helped to organize the first YAPC::Europe, and founded the Amsterdam.pm and Bath.pm Perl Monger groups. Currently an active member of London.pm, Brocard also maintains the official Perl Monger World Map at http://www.astray.com/Bath.pm/.
"My plan is to release a 5.5.4 soonish, which builds under modern operating systems and with modern libraries," Brocard wrote on the perl.perl5.porters newsgroup. "I really believe in Nicholas' view that it is a moral imperative to maintain old releases of Perl. I don't plan on changing much at all. Bug fixes will not be part of 5.5.4. Security fixes won't be part of 5.5.4. This is much like 5.6.2. Suggestions and offers of help welcome."