All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Day 60: The second month.

autrijus on 2005-04-01T16:35:27

It has been two months since I first started Pugs. Compared to one month ago, we have 53 committers (was 16), 1395 commits (was 373), and a new roadmap that more closely align us with the Parrot project. As Nicholas had put it in the Parrot FAQ:

Pugs will probably be the compiler that first compiles the ultimate Perl 6 compiler, but thereafter Pugs will no longer be the primary reference implementation.

However, I think this "ultimate Perl 6 compiler" will start off as a simple (even mechanical) translation from Pugs's Haskell code to Perl 6, just to guarantee its correctness. That may or may not come to pass. We'll see. :-)

Today the Hualian gang keeps churning out amazing breakthroughs that read like April Fools day's joke, but are actually all real:

  • clkao implemented the basics of darcs patch dependency calculation algorithm in svk, in a O(n) fashion which is much faster than darcs!
  • acme wrote a new perl debugger, complete with a web interface that lets you step and watch things from a browser!
  • obra prototyped Bamboo, a meta-MVC toolkit that works as a plugin to any MVC frameworks, and we completed a minimal application in it. It's hard to describe Bamboo, other than saying it's a cross between RoR ActionPack and Cocoon FlowScript. I have high hopes on it taking over the world, maybe starting by implementing it in Pugs...
  • ingy designed FreePAN, and figured out how it complements CPAN and other repositories, then talked with gugod so they can make it all happen on this weekend.
  • mugwump has written a regexp-based YAML 1.1 validator (and soon parser, based on Parse::RecDescent), that is generated from the BNF grammar. It is likely to pave a way to the BNFC/Alex/Happy based YAML support in Pugs.
  • miyagawa, although not in hualian physically, stayed with us in #yapc.tw, kept sending Kwiki patches, prompting a new release of Kwiki::Atom. A new set of Kwiki/Spork/Spoon releases will happen soon, too, with fresh tweaks from YAPC::Taipei.

So, what did I do, you ask? I mostly just kept chating with other hackers about their projects, and try to raise some bad ideas. :-) It feels good to not code a lot for a day, and thanks to #perl6, our puppy is being fed very well when I'm in this IMC-diving mode. In particular, I'd like to welcome our new committer shapr, a veteran lambdafolk who has provided many Haskell insights on the channel. Thanks, shapr!

I think that's all for today. I'll save my "looking forward" paragraph in the upcoming PA02. Meanwhile, you can look at this VICTUALS file. Happy April 1st!

oops. bad attribution on my part

nicholas on 2005-04-01T16:45:39

As Nicholas had put it in the Parrot FAQ:

Oops. I failed to put in the commit message that that question (and answer) was supplied by Aaron Sherman. Sorry. And if I'm being pedanticly honest, most of the answer to the first question was actually supplied by Dan and Autrijus on IRC. I just rephrased parts to make it flow better.

"Second", or third?

bart on 2005-04-01T17:03:56

Surely you mean the third month is starting, as 2 months have passed already.

This reminds me of the discussions on non-existence of the year Zero (looking back in history, it apparently skips from -1 to 1) and on the discussion in what year the 21st century started... (2001?)

Re:"Second", or third?

autrijus on 2005-04-01T17:05:15

Aye, I've just fixed the title. Thanks!

URL for Bamboo

uwevoelker on 2005-04-03T20:26:33

Hello Autrijus,

I would like to try Bamboo out. What is the correct URL for the svn repository? You have only given the svnview-URL.

Thank you, Uwe

Re:URL for Bamboo

autrijus on 2005-04-04T07:55:12

The repo is at svn://svn.bestpractical.com/experiments/Bamboo/ -- but it's probably prudent to wait a little while; it should be ready for general consumption when we upload it to CPAN as Bamboo 0.01.