fuzzix.org

The Joy in What We Do

So Sawyer X gave this talk at this year's YAPC::NA, I urge you to watch it even if you're not into Perl.

I have nothing to say beyond this, other than the fact that I love writing software so much that I hate software. If you ever want to see a fat guy dancing (sober), then come on over to my house when it looks like the software I'm writing is going well. If you want to see me spit blood and rage, all you have to do is tell me about some software that's only kind of crappy. I'm not a great programmer, barely a good one, but when I know it can trivially be done better and isn't, I get angry. This means I am angry with myself a lot. Anyone who knows me will know the phrase "software sucks".

So, on to Perl. These people are doing it better, but nobody seems to know about it. This is a major part of what Sawyer's talk above is about (seriously, watch it). So, I've appeared out of my hole (yeah, been quiet around here, got me a job) to briefly list some Perl awesomeness, the bits I like and some bits I anticipate using, in no particular order:

The MOP - So Stevan's crazy and wants to put the ideas behind Moose right into core Perl. This is cool for a number of reasons, not least of which (to me) are performance and packaging. Having that power right off the bat (even in your crappy system Perl) will be great.

Dancer (2) - Don't use it as an example of how to write code, but this blog was written using Dancer 2 and it was so easy to put together that there should be a law against it. I am going to update my templates later to crow about this in the footer or something. It's great, try it. Try Dancer 2.

SDL - Perl's SDL bindings have gotten a lot of love in recent years and are really excellent. (SDLx::App makes things so ridiculously easy that you have no excuse. This very site has a few posts on how simple it is. Trust me, if it wasn't simple, I wouldn't be able to do it.) Maybe we can make some more great games other than Frozen Bubble.

FFI::Raw - Because XS is scary and writing bindings needs to be easier. Graham Ollis gave a talk about it this year.

Subroutine Signatures - "Does perl have subroutine signatures yet?" "YES! (Provisionally, pending successful experimentation)". Honestly, I don't know what this is and have never needed it ;-) ...Perl's implementation goes way beyond the capabilities of most other languages, see Ricardo's 5.20 talk linked below.

Perlbrew - I need this to live. Just don't do the curl-pipe-bash thing, I hate that. Do use perlbrew, though.

Data::Printer - stop using Data::Dumper for debugging right now.

Irssi - Irssi has a Perl interface (and an AnyEvent adaptor) which means I can easily write bots and scripts to do useful (but mostly annoying) things in Perl.

Fuse - Got something which you could abstract as a filesystem? Do it in Perl. I've yet to use this in anger, but I think it's because I lack the imagination to come up with something powerful enough to require it. I wrote some toy examples to demonstrate its usefulness and accessibility on blogs.perl.org.

Modern Perl - chromatic is crazy and wrote a great book and gives it away for free (though you should buy it... every year). It's a really short, accessible set of useful practices which will enhance the way you think about programming and Perl.

And while you're here (if indeed you are still here), Ricardo Signes gave two great, funny talks this year about new and cool things in Perl: