The terrible things (3): Daisy, meet daisy, meet…

This is the third article based upon my Keynote that I presented this year and is part of a series of articles on the Terrible Things We All Must Do.

Lead but not always complete…

Last week I said that I would continue to do these Daisy Chain articles eventhough most of my readers (if you are out there) will no doubt grab the same posts I do the idea is to make links for people who do not find this through the Ironman source and associated areas, who perhaps follow me on Twitter/Facebook.
But I did fail, almost epically, to get a second post up about a different matter and for that I apologise profoundly, hopefully this week I will rectify that situation and you can all stop laughing at me…well laughing at me about that at least…

On with the gossiping.

What we struggle to do…

Alias has made a great comparative post about Perl’s place in the pantheon and ponders what challenges we should face, what is the struggle we should undertake that will spur a round of development as development in one project usually has a knock-on effect of raising the quality/standard of other components – particularly those that it depends upon.

The post begins by giving a brief introspection of the current shape of the languages and their differences and how those differences came about. My only addition to this is that it should have been pointed out that Python is the easiest to learn because it was developed as a teaching language. This is what provides it with its ease of uptake and what limits its ability. Also I am going to make a small gripe, not much of one (and certainly as no insult to an excellently composed piece), in that he doesn’t distinguish between Ruby and Rails and I think there are major differences. In fact to my mind Rails is to Ruby as PhP is to Perl and should be treated in such a manner.

The post also discusses Padre and Strawberry Perl…

Juice for Windows

Speaking of Strawberry the incredibly busy Mr csjewell and his companions have brought us the latest release of Strawberry Perl (which is now available with a Padre release bundled inside). Strawberry Perl is one of the stand-out projects that is running in the community and the ability for them to port latest Perl releases at speed onto this platform is worth of a lot of praise.

Speaking of stand-out projects

More than one person has been hailing the praises of Tim Bunce’s Devel NYTProf (see Leo Lapworth’s post and  oylenshpeegul’s post, Jerome Quelin wrote on How to Profile a Perl Program, for more details) and so I thought I would add my weight to those already calling as I saw Tim’s presentations at London Perl Workshop in 2008 and at Italian Perl Workshop in Pisa in 2009.

Help me if you can….

Another great post this week was by Redspike in which he discussed ‘How to Learn to get help in Perl‘. This is a newish feed and I think this may be the first post from him, if so I commend it as it is humourous, informative and extremely readable, looking forward to further posts from this erudite individual.

Lastly…

There are a final few mentions for me to make of the posts I wanted to share with you, they are in no particular order:

Dagolden has provided a method for getting English-only Ironman feeds. I like seeing lots of different languages in my browser window when I go to the Ironman site – and that is my preference, I can see how this would be an irritation in a feed reader, so we have to applaud dagolden for not only seeing an issue but for solving it. Lets hope he can swing by the #northwestengland irc channel on irc.perl.org and help out with feed manipulation on the upcoming Ironman Archives

Rob Kinyon, a friend of old, has announced the call for papers of YAPC::NA, I dearly wished I was going and presenting once again this year but that plan has come unstuck as the dates for the conference correspond with the due dates for my expected child (Not sad about the child, sad about the collision of dates).

Speaking of conferences, there is also the announcement about YAPC::EU::2010 and this year’s European Perl conference in Pisa commented on here.

Lastly I should just put a shout out about my good friend (and business colleague) Matt S Trout’s post last week which was another in his sensible rants on the community and methods in which we can do things better (Show us the Whole Code). This time he is speaking about Debugging on lists and in channels and how you can help make this process easier.

That wraps up my week of Ironman posts that I needed to share with you.

-ttfn – Mark