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I've gotten a bit of grief over the title of a TechBeacon article I recently wrote: Why Perl 6 is the "Game of Thrones" of programming languages. I wrote the article, but the editors chose that title based on a throwaway line a couple of paragraphs in:

Like A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones), which was started back in 1991 and is still being, ahem, "developed," good things come to those who--well, you know.

To be completely honest, I could have objected and the editors at TechBeacon would have changed it back. However, I didn't object because I was honestly curious what the reaction would be. The general reaction so far has been "great article, awful title." I've no idea if that clickbait title helped draw enough traffic to offset the bad impression of the title itself.

In other news, I now write semi-regularly for TechBeacon and you can check out the list of articles I've written (I'd write more often but I just don't have the time).

Today is Devel::Cover's 15th anniversary. Version 0.01 was released on 9th
April 2001. Which was a day after Perl 5.6.1 was released. Perl 5.6.1 was the
first Perl version which provided the necessary infrastructure for Devel::Cover
to work.

In commemoration I have released Devel::Cover 1.22, which is the one hundred and
twenty-second release of Devel::Cover.

Over that time there have been 1394 commits from at least 87 authors, though the
first 50 releases were made without version control. In 2004 I started using
svk and later migrated to git.

My thanks to everyone who has been involved with Devel::Cover in any way. I
still consider it one of the best coverage tools available in any language.

[This is a post in my latest long-ass series.? You may want to begin at the beginning.? I do not promise that the next post in the series will be next week.? Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.? Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Today’s blog post is brought to you by CPAN Testers.? CPAN Testers: testing your code on every version of Perl on every operating system in every possible circumstance?...?so you don’t have to.

I’ve talked about CPAN Testers before.? If you’ve read that, you probably know how awesome I think they are already.? And, with this foray into creating a date module, they’ve stepped up again.

Now, you will imagine that I made sure all my tests passed on my machine before I dared upload Date::Easy to CPAN.? But that doesn’t mean they’ll pass on everyone else’s machines, so I watched CPAN Testers with some trepidation.? Remember that dates are annoying to get right, and, even though I’m trying to mess with the underlying date code as little as possible, there’s still chances aplenty for things to go tragically wrong.? Which is pretty much exactly what happened.

Archive::SevenZip had been laying around on my computer since a long time. 7-Zip has the great advantage of being able to read a plethora of archive formats, including ISO9660 image files. Its main use is to unzip and sort incoming downloads on my desktop machine, but I have also used it to extract files from ISO-rips of CDs and DVDs.

About a year ago, a few weeks after the Perl QA Hackathon 2015, I started hacking on Test::Requires::Git, as part of my on-going colonization of the Git-related namespaces in CPAN. The idea was suggested by DOLMEN, who also told me to look at Test::Requires for inspiration.

It's now time for test_requires_git to replace has_git.

We're very happy to announce that Strato are supporting the Perl QA Hackathon, as a gold sponsor, for the second consecutive year.

Strato are a global hosting company; they are a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, and have their HQ in Berlin. Their ISO 27001-certified data centres are home to four million domains and about 60,000 servers. Strato offer domains, email, homepage and wordpress packages, online storage, web shops and basic servers through to high-end solutions.

Dist::Zilla is an extremely powerful and versatile CPAN authoring tool, which has enabled me to reliably publish many distributions with minimal fuss. It has the ability to automate your entire distribution building, testing, and releasing process, customized to almost any workflow, but this ability does not come without cost. One of the biggest difficulties newcomers face is sorting out the overwhelming number of available plugins and how to use them together effectively. A good way to start is with the tutorials at dzil.org and the standard [@Basic] plugin bundle. Unfortunately, the [@Basic] bundle is out of date; notably, it does not include the [MetaJSON] plugin, to generate META.json which is now the preferred metadata format for CPAN distributions. For backwards compatibility reasons the bundle itself can't easily be updated with new plugins.

nqp-js-on-js (NQP compiled to JavaScript and running on node.js) passes it's test suit (almost, there is a bug with how regexes compiled at runtime capture stuff which I haven't yet figured out).
While nqp-js-on-js compiles parts of rakudo (with a minor bug fix) it turn out for some reason it's unacceptably slow on some of the larger files (like Perl6::World).
As such I have turned my attention to figuring out what's the problem and speeding nqp-js-on-js up.
Hopefully the next blog posts will be more detailed and contain the description of some nifty optimizations.