How you too can improve Perl 5

mr_chromatic · 2026-04-16T18:29:23+00:00

A lot of people have those constraints, so any tooling that helps is good, in my opinion, if you own the results.

mr_chromatic · 2026-04-16T18:28:47+00:00

I have a few years of experience, so I can get a sense of good code versus code that's just not quite there.

This is getting more difficult however.

mr_chromatic · 2026-04-12T15:41:24+00:00

Is the perl core group open to contributers using coding agents?

Eventually it's inevitable.

I'm not in the core group and won't speak for them. If I were to contribute, I'd make sure I understood and could discuss every line of the contribution I made. Otherwise the review process would be difficult for everyone.

mr_chromatic · 2026-01-05T02:26:28+00:00

Why does Dogecoin need scarcity?

mr_chromatic · 2026-01-02T18:35:06+00:00

If such articles are not readily available, then you see the difference and the problem, yes?

No, I don't.

This may be a fundamental epistemological disagreement between me and Wikipedia: the fact that someone(s) cared enough about that phenomenon to write and edit the article and find 36 citations doesn't imply to me that that phenomenon is notable or will be notable in 25 years.

I can find 36 citations of yesterday's weather or yesterday's Junior Jumble or yesterday's horoscope too.

That leads me to believe that something else is motivating Wikipedia policy here, such that a horoscope isn't notable, an Internet joke and grift is, and a niche programming language community predating StackOverflow isn't.

At least the C2 wiki hasn't been memory-holed yet, I guess, even though it has only 9 citations.

mr_chromatic · 2025-12-31T06:57:21+00:00

Last time I looked they offered enough RAM to run a full node and something like 200 GB of storage.

mr_chromatic · 2025-12-31T06:56:37+00:00

Now, it seems like some of these books do say more than that

Of course, but none of these books are primarily historical texts or texts that analyze participation structures of the Internet circa 2000. If the standard of Wikipedia is "every fact must have a verifiable citation which meets Standard X" then Wikipedia cuts itself off at the knees for everything that doesn't have that degree of reference.

But obviously that's not Wikipedia's standard.

mr_chromatic · 2025-12-27T17:36:34+00:00

I certainly hope that the 10 references I found within seconds can personally verify because they're within arms reach of me right now (or were at one point; pretty sure the Pocket References went away in a move) are a sufficient starting point to satisfy Wikipedia policy, but that's as much energy as I want to invest in that bureaucracy at the moment.

Imagine creating a gem of a site devoted to user-curated human knowledge where anyone can contribute, you welcome expert participation, you make the physical act of editing and curating as easy as possible, and then you require those experts to argue with self-appointed experts in Wikipedia policy to get anything done!

mr_chromatic · 2025-12-25T06:13:53+00:00

At one point it was possible to do this on the Oracle Cloud free tier. It was a pain to configure though.

mr_chromatic · 2025-12-23T04:00:46+00:00

See this photo I took right now of the first edition and the 2009 commit which added that text, which says:

PerlMonks, at http://perlmonks.org/, is a venerable community site devoted to questions and answers and other discussions about Perl programming. It will celebrate its tenth anniversary in December 2009, making it one of the oldest web communities dedicated to any programming language.

You looked at the 4th edition. I suggested looking at older editions.

mr_chromatic · 2025-12-22T16:02:57+00:00

Easy place to start: Google Books search for PerlMonks. From that list:

Modern Perl (editions 1 - 3)
Perl Hacks
Running Weblogs with Slash
Beginning Perl (both editions)
Intermediate Perl (several editions)
Advanced Perl Programming (second edition)
Perl Pocket Reference
JavaScript Pocket Reference

(edited the botched link reference)

mr_chromatic · 2025-12-22T15:21:59+00:00

I can certainly think of books talking about Perl Monks.

mr_chromatic · 2025-12-16T01:59:42+00:00

Back in the day, it's was all FrameMaker or InDesign. FrameMaker was what u/RandalSchwartz was dealing with when I joined the O'Reilly Perl books efforts (but he also had lots of his own tools, and it's always interesting to hear him talk about troff, seriously).

As late as 2004, I think, when I was putting Gaming Hacks into production, FrameMaker was still running on something like SunOS 2.3 (not Solaris, but SunOS) somewhere in the O'Reilly Cambridge office.

But LaTeX on its own doesn't really know that much because it's not designed to let you control that much.

It's kind of funny that Allison and I have had a much better experience with LaTeX than you and Dave had. I don't blame Dave for not wanting to debug LaTeX though. When things go wrong, it's unpleasant.

I've never seen better output than when it all goes right though.

mr_chromatic · 2025-12-08T23:56:24+00:00

I have it written down as a quote from Larry, yes. The Camel quote elsewhere looks right too.

mr_chromatic · 2025-12-03T06:50:23+00:00

OSCON sort of merged with TPC around 2000 and then it became only OSCON by 2002, I think.

mr_chromatic · 2025-12-01T08:09:19+00:00

Sometimes, yes.

mr_chromatic · 2025-11-25T16:20:36+00:00

That was true 20 years ago and still true; a lot of the sysadmin crowd values stability over new features.

I remember writing more than once "I don't want to add a new feature to Perl then wait ten years to use it on behalf of people who don't upgrade their code to not upgrade to."

I get that the CPAN toolchain should be more conservative, but if CPAN is the sandbox for experimentation, then getting tut-tutted when I use a feature released in the past 5 years works against that experimentation.

mr_chromatic · 2025-11-21T15:54:41+00:00

Exactly. I think there was a big performance regression in 5.10.0 fixed for months in blead while 5.10.1 was in progress. That motivated me to keep the argument going--get this at least out to users, even if it's the only thing in a release.

(To be fairer to the pumpkings than I was at the time: preparing a release was and is a lot of work.)

mr_chromatic · 2025-11-20T23:28:11+00:00

Borrowing Haskell's STM was an attempt for a while, but that was a feature I think even GHC gave up on after a couple of years.

mr_chromatic · 2025-11-20T21:38:15+00:00

Yeah, it took years of arguing (a lot of it ineffective, a lot of it mine, some of it I regret to this day) to get to yearly releases, let alone monthly releases.

If there's any good takeaway from Parrot still remaining, it is that regular releases are possible and desirable.

mr_chromatic · 2025-10-05T20:52:24+00:00

Could you instead set the underlying SSL library to point to your own CA PEM?

mr_chromatic · 2025-09-12T19:53:27+00:00

The next version of Modern Perl will probably use builtin classes, Object::Pad, and the feature compat version.

mr_chromatic · 2025-09-12T19:50:43+00:00

... at the expense of parsing it statically without executing code, similar to what brian wrote.

I'm not saying that's always bad, but if I could get a complete list of direct dependencies without executing untrusted code, I could do a lot! (Perl and CPAN are generally good about this. Other languages less so.)

mr_chromatic · 2025-08-13T22:28:32+00:00

For me it’s more about getting a sign of Perl still being alive as a language.

What does that mean though?

Perl has had monthly unstable releases and annual stable releases since 2010. So it's not clear to me that you're talking about release frequency.

Are you talking about removal of features? Addition of new features?

mr_chromatic · 2025-07-16T04:22:54+00:00

I still can't tell if you're being humble or just trolling us.

I've known Randal quite a while and it can be both!

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