2009 In Perl

Repeat after me: I will not pretend to be an analyst or doomsayer, even though the end (of 2009) is nigh.

In 2009, Perl grew up a bit more, both as a language and as a community.

Language Development

Perl 5.10.1 came with a pony to those of us who fear the .0 releases.

The Perl 5.11 development tree got started, and it looks like it is rolling on rails. At this rate, we will see 5.12.0 quicker than you can say antidisestablishmentarianism.

... Perl 6 has made progress both on the specification side and in implementations -- yep, that is plural. It is sometimes confusing when naming changes under your feet, but it is acceptable while the spec is still settling.

Community

In 2009, I think I saw more openness regarding the internal conflicts in the Perl community as a whole; there were abundant admissions that we were not communicating nearly as well as we should, that there was at least a small amount of internal bickering over the present and future state of the onion -- onions, I must inject, tend to come in many shapes and flavours, and are not always the same inside -- really, which way we are going, are we having a conflict or not (yes we are -- no we are not -- huh, are we talking? -- pass the chips), and get off my lawn before I shoot or hug you.

In brief, it looks to me like 2009 was the year when the community showed renews signs of self-awareness.

But much more happened. We got a closer focus on Perl visibility, from my POV mainly owing to Matt S. Trout's lightning talk challenge from NPW 2009, plus a whole range of people working on other PR aspects for ourselves. And mst still keeps his hair colour. Wow.

Other Stuff

I made new friends, I learned a lot, I even got to help out a bit, and I hope that this will continue in 2010.

I hope you will too.

Happy new year!

Oslo.pm Past and Future

In case the title wasn't a give-away: this is a non-technical blog entry.

I became an Oslo.pm member by signing up for the mailing list shortly after the Nordic Perl Workshop 2009. That's cheap (well, free!), easy, and therefore newbie-friendly.

Last week, I dropped in at the general assembly and exercised my speaking and voting rights, and got an inside scoop on how this Perl organization works. The board members were, after all, the guys who did a terrific job arranging not only this spring's workshop, but also mostly the same people who held the workshop of 2006, which also went quite well.

From my point of view, Oslo.pm has come from being an anonymous group to a rather solid little volunteer organization. Before 2006, I'd have said "huh?" if someone asked me who might have anything to do with Perl in Norway, afterwards, I knew there was something called Oslo.pm, and so did a few people in Europe and the USA. After NPW 2009, I think it's safe to say that the organization is now known as a stable and capable group of Perl mongers. That's a decent achievement, especially in this age, when it seems like almost nobody (in Norway) is willing to do anything free of charge.

So what did they think about themselves, and what's going to happen in the near future?

True to the Norwegian spirit, they were modest and self-disparaging, but they were very happy that the attendees were apparently happy, even months later.

Salve J. Nilsen, the Great Leader of 2009, bowed and said farewell to the post of chairman, and now Marcus Ramberg is at the helm.

The new Oslo.pm board will attempt to increase local activity, and there will probably be some kind of technical talk on the first Wednesday of almost every month in 2010. They aim to increase cooperation with local Perl-using companies, as well as aiming for some cross-language and language agnostic sessions.

First out is tomorrow's Perl 5.10 session at Redpill Linpro, which I'm sure will be technically rewarding for those who show up. I plan to!

Group Photos

LR:
ilmari, nothingmuch, claes, szabgab, krunen, ingy, baest, masak, TimToady, Ellen\
trafl, jrockway, batman, pnu, jnthn, pmichaud, abigail, Gloria\
mst, sjn, mberends, marcus, sadrak
Photographer: frettled




And, finally, as prompted by Ingy:

NPW 2009 Hackathon

The NPW 2009 Hackathon is well into its second day, and I've learned quite a bit about Perl 6 and more about Perl 5 than I expected.

I didn't originally intend to participate in the Hackathon, and I'm not doing much, but it's definitely worth it.

Yesterday, I stated a goal of adding to the spec a description of how complex numbers should be represented and presented, since that was apparently at least partially unclear.

This lead me into a quagmire of other things I needed to do first, and the "ooh, shiny!" phenomenon lead me astray a few times, ganged up with my general desire to have a functional working environment (Unicode strings in PODs didn't go down well with my current Latin 1-based working environment and the then-installed Perl version), as well as problems getting irssi on my side
But I did get to participate and act as distraction in an entertaining and useful discussion regarding types in Perl 6, as well as host a social dinner for those who wanted a break from the hackathon.

Today, I'm picking up where I left off, trying to form a mental picture of the spec that's good enough to add and/or change relevants bits of it.

The rest of the guys are adding code and doing other useful things. :)