The Perl Journal March, 2004
Larry Wall posted an outline of future Apocalpyses to the perl6-language list, with brief comments on the unwritten chapters. The schedule posits some 33 Apocalypses, but many of these are being written in parallel, and most contain significantly fewer RFCs than the first six chapters. "Perl 6 now is pretty much A1—6 plus 12," Larry commented. "That's actually most of the earth-shaking stuff." He also mentioned that Apocalypse 12, covering objects, "is mostly written." The Apocalypse outline is at http://www.mail-archive .com/perl6-language@perl.org/msg15276.html.
Meanwhile, Damian Conway published Exegesis 7, explaining how text formatting will work in Perl 6. "If you're a regular user of Perl 5's format," he notes, "you might like to try the form function instead. It's available right now in the Perl6::Form module, which waits upon thy pleasure at the CPAN." (For those who can't remember Apocalypse 7, titled "Formats"—it was appended to Apocalypse 6 and consisted of: "Gone from the core. See Damien.")
"Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...objects!" wrote Leo Tötsch, announcing the Parrot 0.1.0 release. Dubbed the "Leaping Kakapo" release—as it was made public on February 29—Parrot 0.1.0 also boasts basic multithreading support, better documentation, and many more supported platforms as well as lots of other features and bug fixes. A kakapo, in case you were wondering, is a rare flightless parrot from New Zealand.
In other release news, the Perl 5 developer team has completed Perl 5.0005_04, a maintenance release that allows Perl 5.005 to compile and run under UNIX systems with recent Berkeley DB libraries or GCC 3 as well as under Mac OS X. According to pumpking Leon Brocard, 5.005_05 will be released later in the year and will feature more portability fixes.
Hundreds of haikus were submitted to the ActiveState Perl Haiku Contest, in both the categories of Haikus Written About Perl and Haikus Written In Perl. Netherlander Ed Snoeck took top honors in the first category with a poem that evokes both pearls and Perl:
ugliness that grows into beauty inside of your favorite shell
Dallas programmer James Tilley won the grand prize in the second category with his rigorous poesy:
no less can I say; require strict, close attention while you...write haiku
A couple of poets had the temerity to submit haikus extolling the virtues of C or taking digs at "unreadable" code, but most of the entries seem as heartfelt as they are witty. You can read them all at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Perl/Haiku/.
YAPC::Europe has issued a call for papers. The theme of the conference is "Perl for Profit," but talks on other topics will also be considered. Proposals must be submitted by Friday, April 30th. The conference will be held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, September 15-17. See http://belfast.yapc.org/ for details.
The First Italian Perl Workshop will be held in Pisa, July 19-20. "Most of the workshop will probably be in Italian, but talks in English are welcome, too," one organizer noted on perlmonks.org. The web site is http://www.perlworkshop.it/.
An Austrian Perl Workshop is scheduled for May 20-22 in Vienna. Leo Tötsch is giving a Parrot tutorial, and other talk proposals are welcomed at http://vienna.pm.org/en_ws_talk.html.
Not to be confused with the Austrian workshop is the first Australian YAPC, which will be held this December in Melbourne. The conference is still taking shape; details will appear at http:// yapc.dlist.com.au/.
The Perl Foundation has announced new members of the Grants Cmmittee. Dan Sugalski, who received a grant in 2002, will be cochairing the committee with Hugo van der Sanden. The other voting members of the committee are Leon Brocard, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Nicholas Clark, Brigitte Jellinek, and Stas Bekman. Allison Randal, the president of Yet Another Society, will have a nonvoting place on the committee as board liaison. Committee members cannot be awarded grants.
Randy Kobes noted on use.perl.org that the CPAN-Search-Lite project is now on SourceForge, with source code available (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpan-search/). "This doesn't have all the great features of search.cpan.org," he wrote, "but it may be useful to those interested in setting up a minimal searchable CPAN database—it can even be used on a box without a local CPAN mirror (albeit without the capabilities of extracting module and package docs)."