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Now that I've joined the Board of Directors for the Perl Foundation, my first action was to propose a marketing committee be set up and the board approved the proposal. It's an ambitious goal, but a useful one. In the past, we've merely had a single PR person such as Andy Lester or Joshua McAdams. The problem with this approach is that there is simply too much for them to do by themselves. The new committee is designed to break their roles down into various responsibilities, each of which has a clear, single goal. Those roles on the committee are as follows:

1. Blogmaster
2. Site design
3. Market research
4. Press releases
5. News articles
6. Social networking

Dan Magnuszewski is the new chair for this committee. His responsibility is primarily to summarize the actions of those on the committee and to sometimes nudge them if we need more work in this area.

There's also to be a "deputy" chair who has Dan's role and can step in if Dan is away or needs a holiday.

The roles of the various people on the committee are also lightweight. They mainly need to find people to do work in the various areas and to sometimes nudge them to do their work.

The committee and the various roles are designed to be highly autonomous on the theory that it's better that we push to get work done rather than have a heavyweight voting on each and every action. The committee is also set up with some structural issues in TPF. Currently, it's very stressful for some people because they can never delegate their responsibilities and they often have too much to do (it's very hard for a distributed volunteer organization to coordinate things).

We'll probably need to adjust the various roles in the future and further tweak things to see what does and does not work, but we're already getting a number of "behind the scenes" things done. Hopefully, great things will come out of this and we'll keep you posted on the updates.

Google's Summer of Code 2008 is wrapping up now and I'm very pleased with how well The Perl Foundation's students and mentors have done. The five projects which survived the halfway point have all finished with great results.

Many thanks to all of the mentors and students as well as everyone in the community who helped or supported the process. Also, thanks to Google for putting on the program and to Richard Dice and Jim Brandt at TPF.

But the end is only the beginning. We should really get started on next year now. Perl needs to do a better job of attracting students, but I'll have to address these issues in another post.

Most of the students did a great job of blogging their progress, which I think is an important part of Summer of Code for the rest of the community. If you have been following along with any of the student projects, please drop me a note or leave a comment. I would love to hear more opinions from outside of the active SoC participants. Also, please thank the mentors and students for their work. Of course, they "know" you appreciate their effort -- but it really means something if you actually send them an e-mail or say thanks on irc.

For those just joining us, here is a run-down of the SoC projects and some links.

Flesh out the Perl 6 Test Suite
    student: Adrian Kreher
    mentor: Moritz Lenz
    Blog | Code | Moritz's Recap

wxCPANPLUS
    student: Samuel Tyler
    mentors: Herbert Breunung and Jos Boumans
    Blog | Code | CPAN distribution

Native Call Interface Signatures and Stubs Generation for Parrot
    student: Kevin Tew
    mentor: Jerry Gay
    Mail | Code | (older branch)

Incremental Tricolor Garbage Collector
    student: Andrew Whitworth
    mentor: chromatic
    Blog | Code

Math::GSL
    student: Thierry Moisan
    mentor: Jonathan Leto
    Blog | Code | CPAN distribution | Jonathan's Recap

Yesterday, TPF received word from Google that our submission to be a participating organization in the 2008 Google Summer of Code project was accepted.

Our thanks to everyone involved in the application process, but especially to Eric Wilhelm who organized and drove the effort.

We will provide more details here soon.

A while back, around November 2007, there was some discussion about performance problems with rt.cpan.org to the point that some found it to be almost unusable. I bring this up here because there were some suggestions that perhaps TPF could buy some new hardware. If you scroll to the bottom, you'll see Jesse Vincent jumped in and said he thought the performance wasn't a hardware problem and he could make some changes, but he needed help locating the trouble spots.

I'm happy to report that Jesse's team, led by Ruslan Zakirov, has implemented some changes and performance seems to be much better now. Even better, many of the changes made for rt.cpan.org have filtered into the regular RT codebase as of RT 3.6.6. Jesse also told me they are working to publish all the bits of rt.cpan.org that are still
locked away so that the perl community can contribute more actively.

I just wanted to say thanks to Jesse (and Ruslan) for following through on the fixes. I also want to thank Adam and others for pointing out the problems so we could address them. A public service isn't really a service if people can't use it.

Note: I applied some updates after I first published this.

What sort of programmer uses Perl? Do most Perl programmers use it as a primary language, or just write the occasional script? And are there really as few women as conventional wisdom says? Kirrily Robert wants to know, and wants anyone around the world who uses Perl to help by answering a simple five-minute survey at perlsurvey.org.

Kirrily's goal is to "take a snapshot of the Perl world as it currently stands." As an active member of the Perl community, she's often asked questions about Perl's users and is only left to "hypothesise, generalise, and hand-wave." Further, software communities can often be an echo chamber where people only hear from like-minded people. The Perl Survey is an attempt to break out of that echo chamber and hear from all Perl users around the world, regardless of skill level, not just the core users most active in vocal communities.

An interesting part of the survey is asking the respondent's salary, if they choose to release it. "I hear a lot of talk about the going rate for Perl programmers," Kirrily says, "and whether organizations that claim they can't hire Perl programmers simply aren't paying enough." Correlating results with the other data points could shed light on the topic. The survey's reach could also help users around the world. "Salary information can be very hard to find out for anywhere other than the US," says Kirrily, an Australian.

The survey will be open until September 30, 2007. Then, in October, Kirrily will be announcing the results and releasing the raw data, minus email addresses, under a Creative Commons "CC-BY" license. Her hope is that other interested people will provide their own analyses of the results.

For further information, and to participate if you use Perl at all, visit perlsurvey.org.

Parrot 0.4.13 can be obtained via CPAN (soon), or follow the download instructions at http://parrotcode.org/source.html.

Parrot 0.4.13 News:

• Languages:
  • Updated Lisp, Lua, PHP ("Plumhead"), Python ("Pynie"), ABC, WMLScript, and Tcl ("ParTcl").
  • Perl 6 passes all of the sanity tests.
  • PGE supports latest Perl 6 grammar syntax. Perl 6, Python ("Pynie"), and ABC parsers updated to match.
  • Updated PHP ("Plumhead") to Antlr 3.0.
  • Lua added the beginnings of a PGE/TGE based compiler (not yet replacing the Perl/Yapp compiler).
  • Lisp updated for current features, added a test suite.
• Core Implementation:
  • Filled in features and backward compatibility for PDD 15 objects. New object metamodel passes 85% of old test suite.
  • GCC API symbols are visible externally only when explicitly exported.
  • Added generated GCC compiler attributes to increase warnings, and cleaned up resulting warnings.
  • Code cleanup efforts and fixed memory leaks by the cage cleaners, resulting in notable speed increases.
• Misc:
  • Updated Parrot distribution to Artistic License 2.0, from dual Artistic 1/GPL license.
  • SDL examples brought up-to-date with current features.

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project.

Enjoy!
Allison