Just another lambdabananacamel,

I enjoyed Aldo Cortesi's rather interesting post about language statistics on github. He's done some good analysis, and there are some interesting nuggets of information to be had about Perl, Haskell (though fewer, as there are only 18 projects that made his criteria) as well as other languages. Of course, there is some silliness there [...]

A couple of comments on the first post suggested that I look into the command-line bookkeeping application ledger, or indeed, its Haskell version hledger. They look very interesting, but rather hard to wrap my head around. So though I'm going to bear them in mind for later, I'll carry on doing these sketches till I understand the problem [...]

I've recently been trying to improve my rather disorganized personal finances. While I previously "managed" by leaving the bulk of the money in my account and hoping that I'd calculated my expenses versus salary roughly correctly, this is suboptimal for answering various questions like "Do I have enough money to go on holiday?" or "Have I forgotten to pay [...]

The Portuguese team did a fantastic job with this year's Perl conference YAPC::EU::2009 in Lisbon just last week. What I learnt Lots of companies -- Cisco, Opera, the canton of Geneva, among others -- are proud to use Perl. There is lots of work going on in the "Enlightened" Perl movement. Including [...]

While we were discussing how to promote the Italian Perl Workshop, and the planned training on Moose, I noted that there weren't any articles on Moose (Perl's modern OO implementation, inspired by CLOS, Smalltalk and Ruby) on perl.it. Lordarthas of course told me "well volunteered!"... oops. I pointed out that I don't really know Moose, and we eventually agreed that [...]

Organizing a conference is hard, let's go shopping! For the first time I'm officially helping, not just for the Italian Perl Workshop this year, but possibly for YAPC::EU::2010 too. I've been working with the perl.it guys on the proposal to host the European Perl Conference 2010 in Pisa. We submitted the bid on Monday, and [...]

The preparations for this year's Italian Perl workshop are hotting up, and it's looking like it might even top last year's event. I'll just focus on the international track (in English) here: we've already got some great guest speakers lined up: Tim Bunce, the author of DBI, one of the finest database interfaces known [...]

The Perl web framework Catalyst has, and I'm fairly sure this is in common with many such frameworks in any programming language, a concept of a store of data, scoped to the current request, called the "stash". I've mentioned a few times that "I don't like it" and the reaction I get suggests that I don't understand it. [...]

"Currying" is a simple idea that is surprisingly powerful on the one hand, and which was surprisingly hard (at least for me) to get my head around - possibly because the concept didn't exist natively in the languages I learnt first. When you declare a function in currying style, each argument is taken one at a time, returning a new, [...]

The nice chaps at NorthWestEngland PerlMongers have organized a technical meeting on 5th May, at the Manchester Digital Development Agency. I'll be doing a 3rd version of my Functional Pe(a)rls talk, about Haskell-inspired craziness in Pure Perl. And Matt Trout and Ian Norton will be talking about OO Database design, and Maildir migration, so there's [...]