Shuck & Awe #11: Hunting for Perl

[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ perl -V:news

Do you regularly scuba dive in a motley sea of other peeps’ codebase, trying to bring on surgical changes without doing too much collateral b0rking on the code formatting? If so, Steffen Mueller has a nifty trick to share with you. Using Text::FindIndent, he shows how to configure Vim such that it can magically adapts to any indentation policy.

Talking of Vim, Andy Lester let us know that Vim 7.3 is out, with a bunch of upgrade to its Perl-related support files (and that includes brand-new support for Perl 6).

CPAN is great, CPAN is awesome. But, as we all know, the leviathanesque amount of distributions it contains is sometime daunting. Which module should I use to perform $random_task? Jesse Thompson proposes to look at how many other modules are dependent on a distribution as a metric, and provides a greasemonkey script to retrieve that information straight on the CPAN search page.

This year we’ve seen the rise of a lot of über-cool cpan* and perl* utilities. The latest, announced by Cornelius, is a little speed-demon called cpansearch. Written in C (which gives it mongoose-like response time) it is a module searching tool. Already cool on its own

$ time cpans XPath | head
Source list from: http://cpan.nctu.edu.tw/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz
Apache::AxKit::Language::XPathScript     - 0.05 (M/MS/MSERGEANT/AxKit-1.6.2.tar.gz)
Apache::XPointer::XPath                  - 1.1 (A/AS/ASCOPE/Apache-XPointer-1.1.tar.gz)
AxKit2::Transformer::XPathScript         - 0 (M/MS/MSERGEANT/AxKit2-1.1.tar.gz)
B::XPath                                 - 0.01 (C/CH/CHROMATIC/B-XPath-0.01.tar.gz)
Cindy::XPathContext                      - 0 (J/JZ/JZOBEL/Cindy-0.15.tar.gz)
Class::XPath                             - 1.4 (S/SA/SAMTREGAR/Class-XPath-1.4.tar.gz)
Config::XPath                            - 0.16 (P/PE/PEVANS/Config-XPath-0.16.tar.gz)
Config::XPath::Reloadable                - 0.16 (P/PE/PEVANS/Config-XPath-0.16.tar.gz)
Email::MIME::XPath                       - 0.005 (H/HD/HDP/Email-MIME-XPath-0.005.tar.gz)

real    0m0.168s
user    0m0.016s
sys     0m0.020s

it can yet achieve higher levels of radness if combined with other Perl tools like cpanm:

# install all that is tiny
$ cpans -n Tiny | cpanm

YAPC::NA and YAPC::Europe came and went, but Karen Pauley reminds us that there’s still YAPC::Asia happening in Tokyo in October, and that the tickets are now on sale.

What? Didn’t attend any YAPC::* yet this year? Oh well, at least Matt S Trout points us where we can download videos of some of their talks.

Have you noticed that you can’t use the 5.10 features (like the smart match, say, given / when) under the Perl debugger? Pablo Marin-Garcia did, and dug to find out why. Also check the comments for a dirty way to force the debugger into a more modern attitude.

Moose is a mighty beast, but it’s not the fastest ungulate you’ll ever meet. But thanks to Dave Rolsky, it now compiles 10% faster than it used to. w00t!

Alberto Simões reports that the Perl Foundation accepted grants for 2010Q3 are in. From the look of it, lots of documentation — game development with SDL, Perlbal, Perl 6, Parrot — is coming our way.

Does anyone remember Mazinger Z? Each time we thought that giant robot achieved the peek of ultimateness, it would interface with a new ship/contraption/coffee machine and become even awesomer. Moose, with its MooseX cohorts, is a little bit like that. But with antlers. Florian Ragwitz shows us how the raw power of parameterized traits given by MooseX::Role::Parameterized can now be harnessed by MooseX::Declare.

use MooseX::Declare;
use 5.10.0;

role Gizmo ( Str :$codename ) {

    has 'upgraded' => ( is => 'rw' );

    my %gizmo_ability = (
        'wingy_thingy'  => 'fly like a butterfly',
        'smash_o_tron'  => 'squish things',
        'expresso_core' => 'make darn good coffee',
    );

    method "summon_$codename" {
        say "Giant robot summons its $codename";
        $self->upgraded(1);
    }

    method unleash_power {
        say $self->upgraded
            ? "Giant robot can now $gizmo_ability{ $codename }"
            : "No gizmo? No super-power for you"
            ;
    }
}

class GiantRobot::Omega {
    with Gizmo => { codename => 'expresso_core' };
}

my $robot = GiantRobot::Omega->new;

$robot->unleash_power;         # No gizmo? No super-power for you

$robot->summon_expresso_core;  # expresso core, to me!

$robot->unleash_power;         # *mouahaha*

[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ perl -E'sleep 2 * 7 * 24 * 60 * 60 # see y'all in 2 weeks!'