While I was at OSCON I found myself chatting with various non-perl and ex-perl folks and many of them had the same impression of Perl as a great language for hacking out short scripts to get stuff done, right now and possibly under severe time pressure. For these people, those scripts would very rapidly become unmaintainable. And it’s easy to see why they came to that conclusion. Perl was originally designed and implemented by a systems administrator as a tool to make his every day tasks easier so there are a bunch of shortcuts and defaults that do exactly that - make Larry’s life in 1987 easier.

If you’re interested in the repertoire project, here’s my current rules of engagement for recording for it: One Song One Mic One Take (by which I mean no comping or overdubs, not “only one attempt”) So far, everything has been recorded using FiRe, a dead simple field recording app on the iPhone/iPad and uploaded pretty much directly from the phone to SoundCloud, though I am thinking of switching to using my BandCamp account because, although the player may not be as pretty, the site is free.

Right, I’ve about had it up to here with the Xkb documentation, and with the layout of my shiny new Kinesis Advantage Keyboard. The cursor keys on the kinesis are horribly situated. What I’d like to do is hit a key (AltGr, say) and have it put the keyboard into a navigation mode, with the arrow keys mapped onto WASD and possibly HKJL and, ideally with Home/End, PgUp, PgDn in sensible places as well, then, once I’ve done, hit the mode switch key again and I can carry on programming.

If you saw me at YAPC::NA or you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I’ve been waylaid by Repetitive Strain Injury, so I’m going to be cutting back even more savagely on the blogging I do here. However, I do need to vent, so I’m starting to use my Audioboo (for short audio blog posts) and accounts. I’ve been inspired by Jon Boden’s wonderful A Folk Song A Day project to undertake my own repertoire challenge.

Over on Twitter, Allison Randal said: Open source isn’t just a licensing/business strategy, it’s a better way of producing software and a better way of training developers. The driving principle of the academic model is to make students fail. The bell curve rules, if all students pass something is “wrong". The driving principle of open source is to help each developer reach their own greatest potential. Good developers are good for the project.

Graeme (@mathie) Matthieson is one of the good guys. He’s also one of the people behind the Scottish Ruby Conference (née Scotland on Rails). I spent my own money to go to the first one they ran, and it was a great conference. To judge from the tweets around this year’s conference, they’re not slacking off at all. Even though I’m back to being a Perl programmer nowadays, I wish I’d been in Edinburgh last week.

So, Giles Bowkett asked me on facebook “Why Perl?”. This is the long answer. I’m a Perl hacker. I have been for around 16 years now. Around 5 years ago, prompted by the Pragmatic Programmer and Adam Turoff, I started looking at Ruby, and Ruby on Rails and sort of fell into maintaining Typo. Why? I was getting hacked off with Perl. I was coming to the end of my tenure/tether as Perl 6 Summarizer: watching a language that I still want to use before I die taking forever to get done gets wearing after a while, especially when you’re spending 8 hours a week summarizing the activities of a development community that, in parts, was verging on the toxic (it’s way better now).

There’s something satisfying about reaching the point when you can’t decompose an object any further and all your methods are tiny and do one thing - it’s especially gratifying when you learn something new in the process. Sadly, it doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, there’s usually annoying bits and pieces where you have to placate the language in some fashion that breaks the flow of what you’re writing.

In Ruby, when you’re doing division on integers, things can get a little counter intuitive. For instance, 6/4 is obviously 1. At least, it is until you decide that you’d rather have numbers that behave a little more like ‘real’ numbers and you do require ‘mathn’, a module in the Ruby standard library (ie, it comes as part of ruby). Then you enter a whole new world of rational maths, where 6 / 4 returns 3/2.

tap tap… Is this thing on? So, I recently noticed that Test::Class 0.33 got released, which means that Test::Class::Sugar no longer needs to depend on a development release, and I also noticed that it was embarrassingly easy to throw Test::Class::Sugar into an infinite loop by forgetting which way the >> goes when you want to specify the number of subtests in a test method. So, I’ve done a quick fix of the infinite loop problem as well and uploaded version 0.

At last! Start your compilers everybody.

Back in January, I wrote that I was choosing Perl to revisit as my language for recreational programming. Quite a bit has happened since then. I gave a talk on MooseX::Declare to the London Perl Mongers and will be delivering an extended version at this year’s YAPC::Europe in August. Then, a week ago, I accepted an offer to work full time as a Perl programmer again. In London. Sing “Ho!” for the life of the long distance commuter.

Back in (crikey) February, I gave a talk at the London Perl Mongers’ technical meeting about Moose for Ruby Programmers and wrote it up here. Mike Whittaker was in the front row of the audience with his iPhone and, a couple of minutes in, started a voice recording and gave me a copy. So… finally… I’ve taken the time I should have been using to write another article for The H and wrestled the slides and the audio into something like sync and uploaded the results to Vimeo for your viewing pleasure.

Mum was often the only women [at British Leyland sales conferences]. In those days it was apparently common for presenters to slip the occasional naked lady into the slides “just to keep everyone awake”. When this happened, there’ be slightly embarrassed laughter and a few heads would turn to look at mum. Who ignored it. It doesn’t happen so often any more That was me writing about Women in Open Source in 2005.