A quick collection of all the fake Orly book covers I find around on the internet.

I am seriously considering writing content for the “Expert Excuses for Not Writing Unit Tests” one.

EDIT - I actually did write some content for it https://boyter.org/posts/expert-excuses-for-not-writing-unit-tests/

I've used Perl 6 for IRC bots. The ease of writing parallel code, nice OO model, multi dispatch, and subsets make it very pleasant to do them in Perl 6. Here's a bot I wrote that listens for GitHub webhooks and reports new commits and PRs: https://github.com/perl6/geth and here's another one that's just a bunch of random features: https://github.com/zoffixznet/perl6-buggable/

I also heard people say grammars are the most note-worthy feature of Perl 6 and people basically use them to quickly hack up a nice little micro-language in which they then attack their problem. Before I came to Perl 6 I was dumb as shoe when it came to writing parsers, but I find it trivial to do with Perl 6 grammars.

Do I like it? Although I'm obviously biased, I love the language. It lets you write beautifully concise, yet still readable, code. It even lets you use much more readable syntax for regexes. Somewhat regretfully, it made it very difficult for me to learn other languages, as in them I end up writing 3x, 4x, 6x the amount of code and I keep getting reminded of Larry Wall saying Perl 6 would be the last language you'd learn. In Perl 6 I can "talk"; in other languages, I write "code".

However, while the language is fantastic, the implementation still has a lot of work to be done to polish it off. It's basically a 1.0 release. Unlike Go, Rust, or Swift, there isn't a giant corporation behind Perl 6 that can just throw money at problems until they disappear. Compared to other languages, some things are still unoptimized and are much slower. I spotted some leakage that makes it problematic for very-long-running (months) programs. About 65 new bug tickets are opened per month. The test suite is pretty sparse in some areas (which is the likely reason for many of the new bug tickets). But... three new core developers joined this January, so hopefully all that will get improved pretty fast.

Someone in the comments also mentioned the baby-sized ecosystem... Since Perl 6 lets you use C libraries without needing to compile anything, people wrote stuff like Inline::Perl5 and Inline::Python that let you import and even subclass stuff from Perl 5 and Python. And that's a bit of a double-edge sword: yes, it's trivial to use libraries from Perl 5 and Python, but it also stunts the ecosystem; no one has enough motivation to re-invent the wheel in Perl 6 when the wheels from other languages are reasonably usable.

Being a comprehensive and complete enumeration of the Operatic Elements of the Perl 6 Language, assembled and drawn with dedication and diligence by M. Lentczner as a service to both the Community and the Republic.

May this simple presentation with various illustrative devices increase Knowledge & Understanding amongst practitioners in the art of Software.

Third Edition, February 14th, Two Thousand Nine

Une complainte qui cache un plaidoyer politique.

Most of the GNU Emacs integrated environment is written in the programming language called Emacs Lisp. The code written in this programming language is the software—the sets of instructions—that tell the computer what to do when you give it commands. Emacs is designed so that you can write new code in Emacs Lisp and easily install it as an extension to the editor.

(GNU Emacs is sometimes called an “extensible editor”, but it does much more than provide editing capabilities. It is better to refer to Emacs as an “extensible computing environment”. However, that phrase is quite a mouthful. It is easier to refer to Emacs simply as an editor. Moreover, everything you do in Emacs—find the Mayan date and phases of the moon, simplify polynomials, debug code, manage files, read letters, write books—all these activities are kinds of editing in the most general sense of the word.)

This page contains snippets of code that demonstrate basic EmacsLisp programming operations in the spirit of the O’Reilly cookbook series of books. For every task addressed, a worked-out solution is presented as a short, focused, directly usable piece of code.

All this stuff can be found elsewhere, but it is scattered about in libraries, manuals, etc. It would be helpful to have here in one spot.

These recipes should be pastable into the scratch buffer so that users can hit ‘C-j’ and evaluate them step by step.

Frameworks are one of the hugest anti-patterns in software development. They're hard to learn. They limit your creativity. They increase your project's complexity and dependencies. They go out of business and get abandoned. You have to maintain and upgrade your code to match the latest framework versions for no good reason. You have to search for help and ask others for advice when you're stuck. And you probably only need a small percentage of features that the framework offers anyway. They just don't make much sense.

L'autre site.

Un livre qui a l'air excitant !