December 2009 Archives

Over the past few weeks discussions have been taking place on our Marketing list regarding different ways to promote Perl. One idea we are running with is promoting Perl at technical conferences where the main focus isn't Perl.

Gabor has announced that there will be a Perl booth at FOSDEM in February next year. This is, hopefully, the first of many conferences that are targeted.

To help co-ordinate our efforts we have created an events mailing list.

To subscribe to the list please send a message to events-subscribe@lists.perlfoundation.org .

Once you are registered you can send messages to events@lists.perlfoundation.org. The list also has a public archive.

Eric Wilhelm has finished his grant improving learn.perl.org". He has written
six tutorials - from "Getting Started with Perl" to "Your First GUI Desktop
Application".

The six tutorials are

• Getting Started with Perl
• Control, Structures, Scoping, and Subroutines
• Using and Creating Modules
• An Introduction to Objects
• Perl/CPAN Configuration Howto
• Your First GUI Desktop Application

The tutorials are currently hosted http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com, but if
Eric finds a better permanent home for them, he will setup redirects for that.

In addition to the original plan, Eric has created the
Combust::Spontaneously module and published it on the CPAN. This
lowers the technical barrier for contributing to perl.org sites by
allowing editors to preview their changes without needing to be an
apache admin. Eric hopes that this tool ultimately leads to perl.org
improvements which exceed what he had planned in terms of site rework
(perhaps it already has).

Eric's grant proposal included a website redesign, but the whole *.perl.org family
was redesigned by Leo Lapworth and friends (see http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/11/new_look_on_wwwperlorg.html).

The initial Grant proposal can be found at
http://www.perlfoundation.org/eric_and_tina_improving_learn_perl_org.

I've implemented 'call' method for interpreter object, which takes already parsed parameters and passes them to tcl/tk interpreter. It is similar to 'eval' method, but it should be faster, and also safer to use, because there will be no need to protect/escape special characters before calls. Also, widget calls to tcl/tk library are based on this method. (this method will be improved from some technical POV, but it is quite usable right now)

Also, 'tk' widgets could be created within parrot as objects, which then could be used like
    wbutton.'call'('configure','-command','.t insert end $w_e')

I very much believe that I'll finish this implementation to the next Friday. Right after that, I'll move to implementing cross-compilation, where I currently have no news.