perl?

General
#1

hey all,

there was lots of Perl meta discussion last tuesday, and even talk of
getting a user group together. throwing this out as a discussion
starter/reminder; us crazy perl guys can be forgetful at times. :slight_smile:

--Alex GCS/IT C++++$ UBLC++++$ P++++$ L+++$

#2

++roscoe

Cheers

#3

Some of us still use Perl pretty much exclusively. Who cares if it isn't trendy, it still works :slight_smile:

#4

Guis:

I hear this all the time, “Perl, it’s not a real language”, “Yeah it has a niche”
\

Heck I worked for a company that used it pretty much their whole web system.

It comes in handy as you know when you need to talk to the machine underneath.

I still use it at home to try out ideas. I also use it to query the info on a digital photo to mark the photo with info (date, time, iso, f-stop, etc)

I could spare a night or two a month to meet, learn, play, etc.

Cheers

Roscoe

#5

I’m glad to see people are still interested after the meeting is over! I’m planning to get us set up on Perl Mongers and get a mailing list going.

How would one Friday evening a month be, on a different night than the 2600 meeting?

#6

I really don't know Perl (hopefully you'll forgive me for that), but
if there ever were a Perl-related class or meetup or anything, I'd
probably attend. It's the sort of language that I feel I should know
since I'm always writing jumbled conglomerations of bash, cat, uniq,
sort, sed, awk, egrep, find, tee, and commandline pipes, generally
forgetting the nuances of each little component.

#7

$dayjob involves perl day in, day out; the last thing i want to start
the weekend is to talk about more work related stuff.

if im the sole detractor, as long as there is beer, i'll make do and
take one for the team. :slight_smile:

#8

A lot of our automated scripts (command line installers, build scripts, etc) that I maintain at work are written in perl, so I could be interested in hanging out a perl meetup (just to toss my hat into the ring)

#9

Cinci2600 is the first friday of the month at 7p and i am partial to fridays because i work nights the first half of the week. If we can firm up the day and time i will cross post the announcement on the cinci2600 mailing list and website.

#10

Thanks for the cross post offer Chris.

The reason I thought Friday would be good is so people from out of town could possibly make it once it gets listed on Perl Mongers. But Monday, Wednesday or some Thursday’s would work also for me. How would Wednesday February 15th work for everyone for a kickoff meeting?

Hodapp, it sounds like you are a natural fit for Perl and would pick it up very quickly.

#11

feb 15th works for me. any ideas for time and place?

#12

how about at the hive at 6p or 7p?

i'm there most wednesdays for open shop night, but few shop-type
things actually happen at that time.

we can use the projector in the lounge and shut the doors if it gets noisy.

#13

Let’s make it 7pm, Wednesday, February 15th at the hive Lounge.

We now have a Cincinnati Perl Mongers group and they provide a mailing list so I’ll send that out when I get it set up. The former organizer of Cincinnati Perl Mongers is talking about coming and bringing a few coworker Perl hackers. If things work out I’ll ask him to co-organize at his location, maybe alternating meetings with ours.

I was thinking to start off we could have a few folks present short beginner level talks to give the people who are not familiar with Perl an idea of what it’s about and to let the presenters get warmed up to presenting. That could be the first hour or so and then some general discussion, networking, etc. This could be the Hive13 kickoff for the Cincinnati Perl Mongers to get ready for a public kickoff in March after people have a chance to find us.

Ideas for presentation topics:

why Perl is cool, what it is well suited for

use warnings; use strict;
what they do.
subs, vars, refs

scalars, arrays, hashes, references

intro to Perl regex

intro to CPAN

favorite modules

the origins of Perl, Perl now.
write once read never? obfuscation, golf
writing readable Perl.

perl critic, Perl best practices.

perldsc, Perl data structures cookbook

#14

use warnings; use strict;
what they do.

+ use Carp.

intro to Perl regex

on the first date? :slight_smile:

write once read never? obfuscation, golf
writing readable Perl.

i am all about the readable perl.

perl critic, Perl best practices.

i can bring all my o'reilly perl books along if people want to page
through em. PBP is a must have; the base perl cookbook is also quite
a good one to have at hand. (its the only tech book on the shelf that
is visibly worn)

perldsc, Perl data structures cookbook

oo, haven't seen this one yet.

other (not beginner) topics of interest for down the road:
   dealing with Unicode.
   lambda expressions / result chaining. see schwartzian transform.
   CGI.pm, for when you just need to get the job done.
   PSGI/uwSGI, for when you outgrow pure CGI.
   mod_perl? if there is interest. i used to be a big fan of
mod_perl, but now have settled on nginx / uwsgi whenever a base CGI
setup doesnt cut it.
   performance optimization / data structure and algorithms analysis.
   interfacing with external systems, aka: trials and tribulations of SOAP::Lite
   extending/embedding, for when the built ins just cant cut it anymore.
   DBI to external database, and how to use SQLite to churn through
larger working sets.

#15

My most worn Perl book is ‘Perl by Example’ by Ellie Quigley. It came with a cdrom with perl and sample source code that was a big help when learning the language.

I have seen and used the other book as well.

FYI

Roscoe

#16

Just an FYI, we also have lots of Perl books at the Hive including the O’reilly collection (still in it’s packaging!)

#17

Have a look at the updated Perl Mongers site. http://cincinnati.pm.org/

There is a link there to the mailing list and I posted about the upcoming meeting Feb 15 @7 at Hive13 Lounge.

#18

Brent, you should create an account on www.hive13.org and make a blog posting about it. Also if you want I can grant your hive13.org account access to update the hive13 events calendar or I can do it for you. Is this event every Weds or the 3rd weds of the month? I’m not sure what the final verdict was.

#19

Another topic for total Perl newcomers might be how to get it
installed on your platform of choice, select an editor and configure
an environment to run the code you generate. I'm sure most people
have already done this, but it wouldn't hurt to at least consider.

Also, are we planning on trying to archive any of these presentations
somewhere?

#20

Marc,
That is a great idea. I would like to get epic setup for Perl like you were telling me about.

I hadn’t thought about archiving anything but that sounds like a good idea also. We could add them as pages to the pm.org site or set up a blog somewhere. I’ll check on how much space pm.org will let us use.