Perl News
The Perl Journal May 2003
By Shannon Cochran
The Perl Foundation Wants Your Two Cents
Following discussion about whether Perl 6 and Parrot have been eclipsing other Perl projects, The Perl Foundation has set up an online survey to determine where advocacy efforts and grant money would be best applied. The survey asks respondents to rate the relative importance of funding Perl 6 and Perl 5 projects, and also asks whether The Perl Foundation should continue to award two large, full-year grants or instead bestow several shorter grants.
For 2003, The Perl Foundation's course is already set: The organization will award several "small targeted grants to individuals." The Foundation has set up a grant proposal form on its web site for individuals wishing to apply for funding. ("Please don't submit a project for other people," the administrators note, "It's not a given that everyone can take time off their career to work for the Foundation.") Projects will be judged on their potential benefit to the Perl community and the clarity of their objectives.
Both the survey and the grant proposal form can be found on The Perl Foundation's web site (http://www.perlfoundation.org/).
Perl Plug-ins for Eclipse Under Development
EPIC is the Eclipse Perl Integration Collection, consisting of a set of plug-ins for the Eclipse tool platform. Three plug-ins are currently under development: the Perl Editor Plug-in, the Perl Debugger Plug-in, and the RegExp Plug-in. The EPIC web site is at http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/.
The Eclipse project (http://www.eclipse.org/) was initiated by IBM; the idea is to create an infinitely extensible IDE in which any specific editor, debugger, or compiler can be swapped in as the developer chooses. The project started with Java tools and has added C/C++ support; the Perl plug-ins are still in an alpha stage of development.
ActiveState Bundles Visual Studio Tools
ActiveState has upgraded Perl ASPX, the Perl Dev Kit, and Visual Perl (along with Visual Python and Visual XSLT) to be compatible with the newly launched Visual Studio .NET 2003. The most significant upgrade is to Visual Python, which now features an interactive testing window and adds enhanced statement completions, language reference help, and support for remote debugging. Visual Perl, Visual Python, and Visual XSLT are also now available as a bundle; the "ActiveState Open Source Language Suite for Visual Studio .NET" sells for $495. Go to http://www .activestate.com/Products/dot_net/index.plex for documentation.
Perl Beginners' Site Launched
Every wizened Perl guru was once a fresh-faced beginner. Shlomi Fish's new web site (http://perl-begin.berlios.de/) is a collection of resources for those just getting started with Perl. The site links to online tutorials, useful books, article collections, mailing lists, web forums, and IRC channels. Fish also maintains a "perl-begin-help" mailing list.
Parrot Win32 Binary Released
Clinton A. Pierce has compiled a binary distribution of Parrot for Win32 from the 0.10 sources. You can download it at http:// www.geeksalad.org/parrot/Parrot_Dist_20030410.zip. "It's still *big*," he writes. "I dropped all of the .obj and .lib files after compilation and it's still a hefty 9 MB. I removed nothing else because in this early stage of development I figure: The people downloading this...know they're looking at a work-in-progress and the source (even the intermediate files) are probably instructive. CVS could be used to update non-object files (like documentation) if someone were so inclined." Users who run into missing DLLs should try installing Microsoft's .NET run time.
Cramming It All In At YAPC
The schedule has been set for the North American Yet Another Perl Conference, to be held June 16-18 in Boca Raton. You can see the list of talks at http://yapc.org/America/talks.shtml. A preliminary list of presentations has also been drawn up for the YAPC::Israel::2003 conference (coming up on May 11th in Haifa, Israel)—those 21 talks are detailed at http://www.perl.org.il/ YAPC/2003/presentations.html.
The Whys and Hows of Parrot
Dan Sugalski posted an entry to his blog this month outlining the history and purpose of Parrot, starting with the bit where Jon Orwant flung coffee mugs at a wall during a Perl 5 porters meeting while insisting "Perl is dead" (or "Perl is f*cked," depending on which version of the story you prefer). The story proceeds from those shards of broken ceramics, continues through an April Fool's joke or two, and winds up explaining how Parrot's mandate has expanded, and why Perl may not always hold Most Favored Language status in the Parrot development process. The full history is at http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000168.html.
We want your news! Send tips to [email protected].
