Posted by Yanick Champoux on Aug 27, 2010
[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!'
It’s that time of the year again — 