Just another lambdabananacamel,

I went to my 3rd Italian Perl Workshop, IPW2008 at the end of last week. It seems to have been the most successful Italian conference to date, and it certainly succeeded at being both a national workshop and an international event. It hadn't occurred to me before that these are actually two orthogonal aims. An international [...]

(Cross posted from my use.perl blog) The Italian Perlmongers are finalising their preparations for IPW 2008, Pisa. I managed to get to the last 2 while I was working in Florence, and the organizers have always managed to get a great venue, coffee breaks with unusually nice biscuits, and put on a fantastic mix of [...]

I recently posted some things to Perl's CPAN that I've previously discussed in this blog. After my post on AUTOLOAD hate, I released the module discussed in it as Sub::Auto. I finally released Attribute::Cached briefly discussed in my Readable Perl slides). Already mentioned Sub::Curried today.

Debolaz asked in #moose about the best way to create: a list of numbers like 10,25,50,100,250,500,1000,etc without tracking any other state than the number itself Nope, this isn't A020179 but the much more prosaic A112024. Debolaz wanted this sequence, or something similar to it, for the same reason the US used it for currency - the numbers are human meaningful, and are useful as [...]

A couple of interesting comments to my Five things I hate about Perl. Quicksilver pointed out that I'd missed the difference between arrays and lists. Yup, that's pretty subtle, and of course it's bitten me a few times (though oddly enough, I don't have that strong a dislike of it). Luqui on the other hand pointed out that [...]

Enough advocacy, let's get to the nitty gritty of 5 things I hate about Perl. (After brian d foy.) The difference between list and scalar context is subtle. One bug that bites people too often is this (for some value of "people", including me, far too often): sub myfunc { return } my $scalar = myfunc(); [...]

In the last post, I mentioned that we might be able to improve the performance of our sort using a "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartzian_transform". This basically involves precaching the expensive calculation (in this case, length), sorting by the cached value, then taking just the original values. Let's test with a list of words: words "If on a winter's night a traveller" So instead of [...]

I've been away for a while from Haskell so I thought I should do some revision and really get my head around Monads. While I plodded through the wonderful "meet the monads" tutorial, I decided that the best way to learn would be to do. By implementing Monads in Perl. I'd highly recommend trying to implement [...]

Thanks to Chris and Thom for organising the recent GeekUp Liverpool talks.  The evening started well with Martin Owen's very interesting talk on justifying Erlang, and why FP is going to become a major factor in tomorrow's concurrency-oriented world.  I demonstrated the wisdom of always saving a copy of your talk in PDF to a [...]

Thom has posted the details of the next Liverpool geekup, Tuesday May 27th at 3345 Parr Street. Last time, I admitted to programming in Perl and got ribbed about it being unreadable.  Fueled by the fervour of the righteous (and maybe a pint or two of Cains bitter) I volunteered to do a talk on [...]