I've collected many of my thoughts on how Perl needs to move forward.

http://perlbuzz.com/2008/05/perl-decentralize-diversify-colonize.html

xoxo,
Andy

I think this is a bit oversimplified. These things can and do take resources from each other, whether we like to admit it or not. That taking of resources can leave a better final state than when we began, but at a cost.

Oh, god, someone did a bad thing and forwarded me an email from this
infernal list that I had been blissfully unsubscribed to for...well,
a really long time now. In spite of having given birth and spending
the past 18 months being a mum I have not completely lost my
character so those who are sensitive to my usual missives should
probably brace yourselves.

Firstly, I have waited for a very long time for maintainers to step
up for a number of things, including the history project. Perhaps I
should write a manual with RULE NUMBER ONE: DON'T INSULT THE PROJECT
YOU ARE WANTING TO ASSUME CONTROL OF AND CLAIM YOU TRIED TO GET IN
TOUCH WITH ONE OF THE MOST EASILY FOUND PEOPLE ON THE NET BUT SOMEHOW
MANAGED TO FAIL. What, do I have to expain this to you idiots? Do you
bitch about a meal from your mother and offer to recook it, too? Not
to mention, my email address is everywhere (and plenty of other
people manage to find me daily) and while I probably should have your
address on a kill filter, I don't as I have better things to do these
days.

Hi all!

I'd like to start the long task of updating
http://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html which has been stopped at 2002.
What I'm planning to do is:

1. Make the document validate:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%%3A//history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html

2. Convert to XHTML 1.1.

3. Add more links and news items (that would be the hardest part) in the
following years. Also prune some dead links.

Note that I have some affiliations. I'll fork the document to a temporary
location (with a note). The copyright reads:

<<<<<<<<<<<<<
The Timeline of Perl and its Culture ©1999-2001 Elaine Ashton. Permission is
granted for use of this document in whole or in part for non-commercial
purposes. For commercial uses, please contact the author first. Links to this
document are welcome after e-mailing the author with the document URL where
the link will appear.

Hi All,

I've been contributing to both the perl 5 and perl 6 wiki's, but find
that they are hardly linked to, the urls aren't exactly easy to
remember, and the inner community (let alone the diaspora) seems to
not know they exist.

Why can't we have a wiki.perl.org ?

You can always link to the perl 6 wiki from there (in fact we already do).

Andy - can we have an article on perlbuzz about the wiki - it is
growing, but slowly and I don't think many perl people outside of the
usual suspects even know of it's existence.

A.

Hi All,

Just a quickie to say, it doesn't take long to add your project and
contributions to perl projects on ohloh.

Heck, I just added Autodia to googlecode (free svn ftw), and then to
ohloh in 10 minutes.

If you have any significant projects - make them count, give kudos to
the perl (and other) developers who deserve it, review projects. It's
all good.

Cheers,

A.

I have always been a fan of Quick Reference Guides,
(like O'Reilly's Perl Pocket Reference that I lost),
cheat sheets, and the like and recently discovered
at a Barnes and Nobles, a bunch of "SparkCharts"
by SparkNotes.com, including a few computer science
topics like JAVA and UNIX.

A quick browse of sparknotes.com shows only a limited
number of CS topic SparkCharts, but no obvious way to
request or suggest new topics for SparkCharts.

Might there be one among us equipped as a writer and
perl expert and willing to work with SparkNotes to
generate a Perl, and perhaps a Perl6, SparkChart?

A Perl SparkChart would be one way to support
advocacy of perl, methinks.

However, perhaps sparknotes would worry that the
there would not be enough of a market for that among
the perceived main customer, the CS college student.

I think sparknotes may have a competitor, as well.

Thank you,

Hi all!

If you go to http://www.python.org/ you'll see at the top-right corner a
picture of an astronaut with the title "NASA uses Python...". Now, to the
layman or beginner it might sound more impressive, but let's get our facts
straight.

Yes, NASA uses Python. However, that doesn't surprise me because NASA, being a
large, old, hetrogenous, government organisation, with a huge budget, and
many IT needs uses a lot of technologies both new and old. I'm pretty sure
they also use Perl (at least that's what Damian Conway implied in an
interview with him about Parse::RecDescent). They use Windows, Linux, VMS and
many other UNIX flavours and OSes. (There was a Linux-running device on the
Columbia).

NASA still uses Fortran on their VAXen.
Hell, they still use VAXen.

NASA wrote a great deal of their satellite software in Forth. And this JoS
item links to an article about the fact that they are still using a 1970's
vintage launch-control computer system:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20020918.html

On Mar 17, 2008, at 10:49, Tim Bunce wrote:

Just saw that. Nice Tim, thanks!

David

On Thu, Jan 24, 2008 at 07:50:40PM -0800, David E. Wheeler wrote:

There is now: http://blog.timbunce.org/2008/03/08/perl-myths/

Tim.