With the release done, life resumed back to a less frantic pace but still with much fun. Yesterday's slashdotting was amusing and nice -- although chromatic regretted using the cute phrase "frivolous toy interpreter" to describe Pugs, overall it has resulted in more interest and reasonable discussions.
The only thing I did totally wrong was redirecting the then-unreachable autrijus.org to my Wikipedia Page before I slept; immediate vandalism ensued to change my photo into goatse, and it stayed up there for six hours. Ow! :-/
Today's #parrotsketch meeting went well. obra adopted a new trick of asking each participant what is blocking them, and it triggered a sudden flow of constructive discussion; I hope this format continues for the weeks to come.
I asked on the sketch for ideas of the Euro OSCON lightning talks -- because I'm procrastinating on preparing my slides, and having to prepare more slides sounds like a useful distraction -- and obra gave me an idea of presenting alien and advanced language concepts. To that end, I submitted the first lightning talk proposal, "Visual Basic Rocks!":
In the Open Source world, VB has long been held in disdain and contempt. However, ever since the VB team was infiltrated by lambda ninjas, it took a strange turn and introduces some mind-bendingly advanced concepts not found in free dynamic languages. You'll have to see it to believe it!
Inspired by her the Hunting of the Perl, I also asked Allison to do a poetry performance together, and she graciously agreed. After some brainstorming, we decided to adapt the Earendil song into "Larry was a mariner",:
In this lightning talk, Allison and Autrijus will perform an adapted version of Tolkien's Song of Earendil, the "title poem" of both Perl5 and Pugs, to celebrate Larry's long and fruitful voyage in the land of Perl.
On the code front, eric256 did a cleanup of the examples/ directory, correcting a few that lapsed due to minor syntax changes, and uncovered a bug: s:g/\s*// would hang indefinitely as our zero-width substitution was not advancing the cursor. I fixed it promptly.
iblech, in search for the remaining few features that the JavaScript backend does not yet support, implemented .assuming (which prompted fglock to add it to PIL-Run too), numeric bitwise operators. He also hacked in escape-code-free .perl support for byte strings, and .perl for regular expressions.
rafl worked tirelessly to get the packaing Just Right; with nomeata's help, Pugs 6.2.10 is uploaded to Debian now. Yay!
Stevan fixed the implementation of eigenclasses a bit, then sanity-checked with me the idea of a parallel eigenclass hierarchy created eagerly for each Class object, in a Smalltalkesque fashion. Fortunately, this eigenclass thing is quite orthogonal to the rest of metamodel, so it shouldn't hinger my move into container and metamodel runcore...
With leo's help, embedding with Parrot (post-0.3.0 trunk) is fully resumed; among other things, we were missing a Parrot_exit call, so stdout was not flushed. I factored out _GlobalFinalizer, so now all embedded Parrot objects and Perl5 objects will be finalized alongsid Pugs objects upon program termination.
That's it for today. See you tomorrow!
