A new site was announced today: perl.la. The stated goal is to promote the Perl ecosystem in Los Angeles and surrounding areas. I've added it to the list of PERL RELATED I link to on the right hand side. Check it out.

It seems that Hudson (that link may not work) has some legal-type issues due to the Oracle buyout of Sun Microsystems. Apparently Sun (and now Oracle) retain some trademarks having to do with Hudson because one of the core developers did his work as a Sun employee.

If you read the above link detailing the problem it does seem that they have resolved the major issues. The one user visible change in all this is that the name of Hudson will change to Jenkins. The link above explains why.

I went to the Los Angeles branch of Perl Mongers last night. It is only the second event I have been able to make. The last time I went to one was over two years ago. Each time the event has been held at my former employer's building. I can't typically make events that are on the west side on Wednesday at 7pm.

It was an ad-hoc meeting. Three presentations, but two of them really had very little to do with Perl. The other presentation was well done but seemed to be geared toward an audience that knew very little about how tie works.

With all that said I'd like to propose some topics I'd like to see presented. 1) Moose, not an introduction. A presentation that covers interesting uses of some of Moose's more powerful features. Perhaps by walking through a reasonably complex module (or set of modules). 2) KiokuDB, what the hell is it good for? I don't know anything about KiokuDB or why it exists. It sounds fantastic...but its practical application is beyond my ability to comprehend. 3) Perl asynchronous frameworks. I'd love to see a compare/contrast of POE, AnyEvent, other. I happen to be a POE partisan, but, than again, I've never used any of the other frameworks.

Given a few more minutes I could probably come up with some other topics. What's that you ask? Can I present? No, probably not. I have some fairly deep knowledge on a few of the topics, but not enough to give a good presentation. Plus public speaking is not really in my wheelhouse.

The Director of Engineering at ActiveState attempts to make the case that Perl Isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever). Certainly he has some stake in such a prediction being that he's at a company that makes its money from dyanamic languages such as Perl. Does he make the case?

My current employer is hiring Perl developers. Now, I have no illusions that hundreds, or even dozens, of people read this blog, but, should you stumble upon this blog posting, please contact OpenX and we'll get back to you.

Is there a contradiction between employers complaining about the quality of Perl job applicants and Perl programmers complaining about the quality of Perl jobs available?

I don't know anything about the book so this is not an endorsement. However, be aware, that Addison-Wesley has released a free chapter for the upcoming Perl book Effective Perl Programming.

It may be worth a look.

I was unaware of the effort (and, besides, I don't have an Android phone), but apparently the effort to have Perl running on the Android OS is progressing.

The title of this post is also the title of a post by JT Smith. He thinks that, because of Moose and other interesting technologies, Perl has its second wind. Well, here's hoping.

Related somewhat is a presentation by Tim Bunce entitled Perl Myths.

Chromatic has written a nice blog post detailing what the big deal is with Perl 5.12. It talks about the new release schedule and the important new features in 5.12.

Perl 5.12 has been released. Go here to find out what is new (since 5.10.1).

Some may be surprised that 5.12 has come out so soon after 5.10. After all its only been two and a half years since 5.10.0 was released. It seems the perl5porters are now on a new release cycle.

So is Perl trending up? This report seems to suggest that it is (and Delphi? Seriously?). Granted it didn't move up a lot, but it did go up. I think this is a good thing. As an aside I am happy to see C doing so well. I started off as a C programmer and I have mostly fond memories.

I have no idea how much stock to put into these popularity indexes. It can make for spirited conversation though.

Ovid, someone who seems to spend a lot of time thinking about testing, asks a question that I have also been asking, "What are the definitions for standard testing methodologies?" The answer appears to be: the definitions are nebulous (at best).

Subversions's CMike (C. Michael Pilato) submitted the vision statement I mentioned just a few days ago. See what you think.

Okay, the title of this post is not exactly the vibe you get from reading this , but it is a bit on the brighter side than his previous post.