If you have a Perl news item you'd like to share, you may post it in this section.
Please try to avoid duplicating news; but pointers (with summaries) to important stories on other sites are acceptable here.
There's some perl games codebases to start writing games in SDL and OpenGL with input and output here :
http://soft.vub.ac.be/svn-gen/perl-repository/
You can write action, shooter, platform etc. games in perl with it.
We meet the 2nd Tuesday each month. We try to have one "basics" presentation, and one more advanced, to appeal to the broadest possible Perl user-base.
For the 99.9% of you not within driving range of the Salt Lake Perl Mongers, I appreciate your patience with this announcement. Salt Lake Perl Mongers is in its 3rd month. While I don't intend to post every month, Perl News is a good way to get the word out during these first 90 days.
If you're interested in the guts and gore that involves VMs, or re-implementing Perl, or implementing other languages, or hanging out with or helping those who do, you might be interested in MoarVM which "reboots the whole VM idea for Perl, based on experience with Parrot, without many of the flaws of Parrot".
It looks like most of the current action is on the IRC channel #moarvm on freenode.net (for which logs started earlier today).
Pinto is an application for creating and managing a custom CPAN-like repository of Perl modules. I decided to play with pinto and while I am chef fan has created pinto cookbook - a chef cookbook to install and configure pinto application. I hope this cookbook will be useful both for pinto users and pinto developers.
The first release of version 18 of Perl 5 is getting close. If you plan on migrating to it or have modules on CPAN, now is a good time to test your code against the upcoming version of Perl.
The venerable perlgeek.de has been down for over a week. So I haven't been able to do the daily summaries I've been doing since September last year. So, instead here's #perl6 highlights/summary for April 25th - May 1st 2013.
I'm on IRC just about all the time (my handle is "thaljef"). But I thought it might be interesting to actually schedule a session and invite people to come in and ask questions about Pinto, suggest a feature, report a bug, or just say "Hi".
So there will be two one-hour jam sessions in the #pinto channel on irc.perl.org this Thursday, May 2. The first will at 14:00 and the second will be at 18:00 (all times GMT). If you haven't used IRC before, this is an excellent guide.
ack 2.0 has been released. ack is a grep-like search tool that has been optimized for searching large heterogeneous trees of source code.
ack has been around since 2005. Since then it has become very popular and is packaged by all the major Linux distributions. It is cross-platform and pure Perl, so will run on Windows easily. See the "Why ack?" page for the top ten reasons, and dozens of testimonials.
ack 2.0 has many changes from 1.x, but here are four big differences and features that long-time ack 1.x users should be aware of.
By default all text files are searched, not just files with types that ack recognizes. If you prefer the old ack 1.x behavior of only searching files that ack recognizes, you can use the -k/--known-types option.
There is a much more flexible type identification system available. You can specify a file type based on extension (.rb for Ruby), filename (Rakefile is a Ruby file), first line matching a regex (Matching /#!.+ruby/ is a Ruby file) or regex match on the filename itself.
Greater support for ackrc files. You can have a system-wide ackrc at /etc/ackrc, a user-specific ackrc in ~/.ackrc, and ackrc files local to your projects.
The -x argument tells ack to read the list of files to search from stdin, much like xargs. This lets you do things like git ls | ack -x foo and ack will search every file in the git repository, and only those files that appear in the repository.
On the horizon, we see creating a framework that will let authors create ack plugins in Perl to allow flexibility. You might create a plugin that allows searching through zip files, or reading text from an Excel spreadsheet, or a web page.
ack has always thrived on numerous contributions from the ack community, but I especially want to single out Rob Hoelz for his work over the past year or two. If it were not for Rob, ack 2.0 might never have seen the light of day, and for that I am grateful.
A final note: In the past, ack's home page was betterthangrep.com. With the release of ack 2.0, I've changed to beyondgrep.com. "Beyond" feels less adversarial than "better than", and implies moving forward as well as upward. beyondgrep.com also includes a page of other tools that go beyond the capabilities of grep when searching source code.
For long time ack users, I hope you enjoy ack 2.0 and that it makes your programming life easier and more enjoyable. If you've never used ack, give it a try.
Stratopan is a new service for hosting custom repositories of Perl modules in the cloud. Private beta trials will begin early this summer. If you'd like to participate in the trials, please stop by https://stratopan.com and leave us your email address. We'll contact you with all the details when the trials begin.
Stratopan will host both public and private repositories with any combination of proprietary and open source Perl modules. And Stratopan is built on Pinto, the open source tool for creating custom repository, so it has the same helpful tools for managing your application dependencies.
Carl Mäsak's upcoming workshop is for anyone who knows at least a little Perl (5 or 6) and wants to see, learn or discuss best practice basics regarding coding simplicity, readability, or elegance in Perl (5 or 6).
This workshop is designed to deliver benefits for all, but should be especially suitable for Perl 5 programmers wishing to spend a few hours comparing and contrasting it with Perl 6.
I'm one of a dozen or so who have signed up already. Hope to see some more monks there!
