Challenges

[Aighearach]

I would like to see a special area of the Monastery where a monk can present a challenge, a place to present and test various strategies and paradigms. Sortof like a Dojo. A hands-on training room.

We could explore timeless questions like, OO, or procedural? I think Perl Monks is the only venue I've seen where this could be handled without a flamewar. We could have some kind of system where a person proposes a challenge in general terms, and then people on both sides can offer some real life scenarios where their techniques excel. Then, both sides can try to implement these things in both, or several, ways, doing Benchmarks as we go, thereby exploring the real advantages and disadvantages involved in each technique. And we can keep a bucket of cold water handy, to dump on anybody carrying a torch.

Other topics could be <BL>

XML::Parser, or that Other Way that people are using to get the chatterbox lines?

Device drivers in Perl? Why not?! </BL>

Another nice touch would be have discussion and code sections in the input forms, and run the code input box through Benchmark.

Paris Sinclair    |    4a75737420416e6f74686572
[e-mail]    |    205065726c204861636b6572
I wear my Geek Code on my finger.

[Russ]

Cool idea.

The most interesting discussions (I think) focus on the relative merits of a variety of techniques. "Is this more efficient than that?" "Can I do it this way?" "What are the security implications of such-and-such?"

This is where the combined talent and expertise of the Perl Monks' monks can really shine.

On that note, I would have to disagree with any kind of automatic benchmarking. The security implications are just too overwhelming. I would be willing to review and benchmark code and post the results (others would too, I'm sure), but I'd hate to see the Perl Monks server crash a lot from automatically executing untrusted code...

Neat idea...

Russ

[Aighearach]

Isn't it a *nix server? Surely there is a way to make it fairly secure. Stick it in a wrapper, or something.

Paris Sinclair    |    4a75737420416e6f74686572
[e-mail]    |    205065726c204861636b6572
I wear my Geek Code on my finger.

[cleen]

hmmm, in a situation where your asking for the server to execute untrusted, unknown code (to test for effiency of course) a wrapper would not be the answer...A wrapper is in most cases some type of frontend..a frontend that takes requests and looks at it and executes somthing else based on that request..or somthing like that..In this case, which I still dont think is a good idea, a highly restricted chrooted enviroment for the code to run in would be the answer...but still, not a good enough answer :)

[redmist]

www.perlmonks.org is running FreeBSD to be precise (http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.perlmonks.org.

[Russ]

Well, how much do you trust taint mode? Knowing that anyone could upload any code and execute it... <nobr>system('rm -fr /')</nobr> would probably not make it past Taint (and nobody lacks permissions to do this, anyway), but I wouldn't sleep well at night...

How about Denial of Service?

while (1) {
  $Str .= 'A few more bytes consumed';
}

I wouldn't want to allow arbitrary code on any of my servers...

Now, recent experience has shown me that there are a large number of monks willing and eager to benchmark code and post the results. I think a section like the one you describe would be quite popular.

Russ