Lori Pike writes "ActiveState is delighted to announce the second annual Programmers' Choice and Activators' Choice Awards. The awards honor the unnamed heroes who actively contribute to open languages and display excellence in their programming efforts." More inside. And remember, that's "unnamed", folks - who needs more encouragement and credit than they're currently getting?
This year we're expanding the categories to include each of our key technologies: Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and XSLT.
The Programmers' Choice recipients are nominated and chosen by members of the programming community - like you. Know someone who's really made a difference using these languages? Tell us about them!
We'll also be acknowledging our personal favorites with the Activators' Choice Awards. While you're busy voting for your favorites our development team will do the same, selecting one deserving programmer in each language.
Get out the vote and stay tuned! Nominees will be announced July 2, 2002. Perl, PHP, Python and XSLT winners will be announced at OSCON July 23, 2002. Tcl winners will be announced at the Tcl conference in September.
Re:"unnamed" ?
chromatic on 2002-06-06T00:30:43
I'm hoping for pseudonymous.
Oh, drat. Was our vote supposed to be secret? Oops.
Re:Damian Conway
gav on 2002-06-06T13:35:46
I'm assuming that they intended it for people that don't get recognition, rather than Damian, Larry et al who get their names up in lights.I was thinking more of people like Matts and Simon who should get awards for being prolific module writers.
Re:Damian Conway
Simon on 2002-06-06T13:58:39
I was thinking more of people like Matts and Simon who should get awards for being prolific module writers.Ack, not me! I made sure "actively" was in bold, since I'm officially retired.
;) Matts, on the other hand - good choice. Him, myself and Schwern are collectively responsible for quite a large chunk of CPAN. :) Re:Damian Conway
vek on 2002-06-07T01:38:27
Yep I'd rather see this going to someone other than "the big two" as there are clearly other unsung heros of Perl. Along with Matts & Simon I'd also add Jarkko to that particular list.
my $cents = 2;
It seems like a good way to come up with names would be to look through the Perl 5.8 CHANGES file and see who has contributed a lot of patches since 5.6.1. Then strike off the names that you hear a lot.
Here's the count I got:
100 H.Merijn Brand
101 Simon Cozens
120 Ilya Zakharevich
128 Rafael Garcia-Suarez
167 Craig A. Berry
176 Peter Prymmer
245 Nicholas Clark
258 Michael G Schwern
oo Jarkko Hietaniemi
All of these seem like reasonable choices. Craig Berry is on the list for doing tons of work on the VMS port; similarly a lot of Peter Prymmer's contributions are for VMS, so you might want to drop them from consideration. (Not that their tireless contributions aren't enormously valuable, of course, but because they benefit a smaller segment of the community.) Brand is a tougher case. Most of his contributions are for unusual platforms, but there are a lot of them, and they include Cygwin, AIX, and HP-UX.
As Simon mentioned elsewhere, he retired, and if you run the same list with just the entries from the last twelve months, you see that. You get the same names in the same order, except that Simon is missing and chromatic has appeared at the bottom instead.
That leaves: Jarkko, Schwern, Nick Clark, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Ilya, and maybe Brand, in that order. Rafael was my own pick before I actually looked at the data, simply because about six months ago I said to myself "Who's this Garcia-Suarez guy?" and then was aastonished to discover how many patches he had contributed without my ever really noticing him. Having seen the data, I'd have to give the award to Michael or Nick, assuming that Jarkko was considered too well-known to receive it.
Re:Who contributed recently?
chromatic on 2002-06-07T14:33:20
That's a good list. It's a bit odd that the deputy pumpkings (ams and sky) aren't on the list, though.
Re:Who contributed recently?
rafael on 2002-06-10T08:40:49
MJD obviously did a grep on Changes. The names of Abhijit and Arthur (and mine, BTW;-) don't appear in Changes for patches they apply directly to Perforce. Re:Who contributed recently?
jordan on 2002-06-09T22:13:52
- Craig Berry is on the list for doing tons of work on the VMS port; similarly a lot of Peter Prymmer's contributions are for VMS, so you might want to drop them from consideration. (Not that their tireless contributions aren't enormously valuable, of course, but because they benefit a smaller segment of the community.) Brand is a tougher case. Most of his contributions are for unusual platforms, but there are a lot of them, and they include Cygwin, AIX, and HP-UX.
I think you have to be careful here with placing a lower value on patches that are platform specific. One of the great things about Perl is it's wide platform support. Perl patches that apply to all platforms often support an odd corner of the language from which few will reap any benefit, also.
That being said, while the count is a good place to start, some analysis of the patches beyond just the count is a good thing.
I would like to point out that Michael Schwern has lent a much appreciated hand to the VMS port. As far as I could tell, Michael learned VMS from ground zero and did a lot of work on getting the tests in order, as well as a fix here and there to the VMS specific code.
Seeing as Michael is not, as far as I know, a user of VMS at all, this is a selfless act of personal sacrifice. Typically, projects like these get by on conglomerated self-interest. It's refreshing when you see someone who pitches in where there is help needed without some personal interest of their own.
His winning the "patch count" race doesn't hurt his standing at all, either.
I know who I'm voting for.
