use Perl

huguei writes "Dolores Labs, who drives internet behaviour studies, did a research about the programming language with the happiest users, using tweets that matched "X language", and looked if it seemed positive, negative or neutral. Guess which one was the language with the happiest users ;)"

Earlier this past week I submitted a proposal to the TPF Board of Directors; the PDF of this proposal is attached here. The plan includes a long list of projects, most of which have been discussed within TPF for a while but have been on indefinite hold due mainly to lack of available effort to address them properly. Some are for TPF process improvement and others are in more direct support of the Perl community. The essence of plan is that I be employed on contract by TPF for the next 6 months working on this list.

The funding for this plan comes from the Ian Hague donation. The proposal I gave Mr. Hague last year featured a division of it into two halves of $100k each: one for p6 development, the other for TPF organization building, which explicitly included the option to fund paid TPF staff. So, we have the money and the blessing of the funder for it to be used in this way. The requested amount in my proposal to TPF is US$5k/month * 6 months = US$30k. This monthly amount is the same as is provided for Hague grants.

As a volunteer myself for the past few years I've been able to allocate maybe 2 hours in an average week to TPF business. Very rarely I've been able to invest significant chunks of time, and it seems the bigger things I've accomplished have come from those periods of exceptional effort (e.g. Forrester Survey @ 40 hours over 2 weeks, Ian Hague donation @ 80 hours over 1 month). This suggests to me that we'll get some really good results out of this plan: TPF has never had on the order of 1000 focussed hours invested into it before, especially for the kinds of things I list in the proposal document.

I think this is a unique opportunity: the right combination of TPF having funding plus the mandate to use the funds in this way, TPF having significant needs, and the right candidate to address those needs being available at the right time to be used in this way. The situation has some similarities with what's going on in some other places in the Perl world, like pmichaud being supported to be the Rakudo architect, and Dave Mitchell working on the 5.10.1 release: support is being used to to let exceptional people spend large amounts of time on big, gnarly problems which advance important community projects, while at the same time these people can enable the volunteer communities also working on those projects be more successful and productive. This is a chance for TPF to improve itself by using some of that same good foo.

Later this week the TPF Board will make a decision whether to approve this proposal. In order to help them with that they want your input -- so, please post any comments you have here. (No anonymous postings please. Use real names and email addresses; pseudonyms are okay only when they're well known through the Perl community and can be correctly connected to email addresses for any needed follow-up.) I am happy to participate, answer questions, clarify my thoughts, etc. here, in email and also over on #tpf on irc.perl.org if you'd rather chat with me real-time there.

Link To Original Source

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the April 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #16 "Bratislava". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1]. The tarball for the April 2009 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the frequent addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we continue to recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtain the latest source directly from the main repository at github. More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo .

Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code named after a Perl Mongers group. This release is named "Bratislava", home to Jonathan Worthington and reportedly an excellent place to obtain beer (a key component of Jonathan's contributions to Perl). The Bratislava.pm group is quite active [2], with regular technical presentations and social gatherings.

In this release of Rakudo Perl, we've made the following major changes and improvements:

• Rakudo is now passing 10,467 spectests, an increase of 3,194 passing tests since the March 2009 release. With this release Rakudo is now passing approximately 65% of the available spectest suite.
• About 2/3 of the increase in passing tests is due to improved Unicode support in Rakudo; constructs such as "\c[LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A]" and Unicode character properties in regexes are now supported.
• The prefix:<=> operator is now gone from the Perl 6 specification (and thus from Rakudo). Use .get for reading individual items from iterators.
• Rakudo now supports typed arrays and hashes (my Int @array), as well as parametric versions of the Associative, Positional, and Callable roles, and parametric role subtyping.
• Rakudo now has sockets support (IO::Socket).
• Subroutine return types are now enforced in some cases.
• Rakudo now supports lexical sub declarations.
• Rakudo now supports some P5-style regexes.
• The "quantify-by-separator" feature has been added, so that one can write / [\w+] ** ',' / to get a comma-separated list of words.
• More builtin functions and methods have been rewritten in Perl 6 and placed as part of the setting.
• Release tar files now contain local copies of the appropriate spectests, instead of obtaining checkout copies via Subversion.
• There are additional improvements and features in this release, see docs/ChangeLog for a more complete list.

The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Perl possible. If you would like to contribute, see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help , ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode.

The next release of Rakudo (#17) is scheduled for May 21, 2009. A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 is available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudo development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.

Have fun!

References:
[1] Parrot, http://parrot.org/
[2] Bratislava.pm, http://bratislava.pm.org/