Just another lambdabananacamel,

This week's simple longest path exercise seems to have had more mileage in it than I expected. Thanks to everyone's comments and suggestions, I've updated with a number of times with, among other things, an improved Haskell version that acts on path elements instead of just characters. But I had intended to do a version [...]

Here's a simple problem, with solutions in Perl and Haskell. @joel: suppose I have a list of strings (they happen to be paths) - how might I find only the longest instance of each path? @joel: that is give /foo /foo/bar /foo/bar/baz /qux I only want back [...]

First of all, a disclaimer: I know "larsen" (Stefano Rodighiero) not just as an ex-colleague (he is one of the most respected senior programmers at DADA in Italy), or through the Italian Perl community, but also as a good friend. But of course, those were excellent reasons to look forward to his book: an introduction to Perl in a pocket [...]

On Saturday I gave an updated version of my Functional Pe(a)rls talk. This time around I cut the whistlestop tour of builtin FP techniques in Perl (map/grep/join) and added a section on Monads - what they are and how to implement them. I'd originally worried that the slides might have been over-academic and [...]

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(); [...]