September 2006 Archives

This week the Perl community lost one of its long time contributors, Nick Ing-Simmons, who died of a heart attack on Monday September 25th 2006.

Nick joined the Perl community in the early days of Perl 5. He consistently contributed to the perl5-porters mailing list and later became pumpkin for 5.003_02 where he added the initial implementation of the PerlIO layer.

Nick is probably best known for his work on the Tk and Encode modules. Tk was initially born out of frustration that perl didn't have a native GUI at the time. Nick tirelessly developed Tk for over a decade. Tk often influenced the development of the perl internals through its aggressive use of XS.

Nick was an intelligent person with a willingness to share his knowledge to help others and one who had a great passion about everything he did.

Our deepest condolences go out to his long time partner, Medi, and all those close to him.

The Perl community owes a lot to Nick so I am sure many will join us in saying

"Thanks Nick"

Mark Stosberg wrote a great article on perlmonks called "Take Back Your Modules" about the responsibilities module users have for the modules they use.

Pat Eyler pointed me to his interview with Kevin Tew of the Cardinal project. Cardinal is Ruby running on the Parrot virtual machine.

John Wang has a great blog entry titled Perl 5 Powering Web 2.0 that points at all the web apps out there that are done in good ol' Perl 5.

You don't have to have Rails to do amazing things with the web. You want frameworks, we got frameworks!

The Perl Foundation, in conjunction with the YAPC::Europe Foundation are happy to announce Houston and Vienna as the venues for next year's North American and European YAPCs.