Perl

If anything about MojoX::Date::Local seems a bit off, that’s because it’s my first CPAN package. It’s just Mojo::Date with a tiny bit of date formatting and time zone stuff I needed in a couple projects. Not time zone math.

No.

God no.

Just showing local time.

So I still love my Datasette dashboard. But — Mastodon::Client with a variation on fREW’s q script I mentioned the other day? Works real good. Fast.

Good night.

Sorry, I couldn’t fit this in a tweet.

Yanick’s concerned about CPAN.

Sweet meejus. Visiting CPAN these days feels like entering the gloomy, foreboding halls of Moria. :'-(

— Yanick "Eldritchicken Soup for the Soul" (@yenzie) April 27, 2020

So I grabbed the authors of the last 5,000 releases and counted authors, using Mojolicious and the MetaCPAN API.

$ export MCP_LATEST='https://fastapi.metacpan.org/v1/release/_search?q=status:latest&fields=author&sort=date:desc&size=5000'
$ http $MCP_LATEST > _search.json
$ perl -Mojo -E 'say c(j(f("_search.json")->slurp)->{hits}{hits}->@*)->map( sub { $_->{fields}->{author} } )->uniq->size . " authors made the last 5000 releases"'
974 authors made the last 5000 releases

Downloaded the file with httPie because I felt bad hammering MetaCPAN with -Mojo g() while sorting out the rest of the :v:one-liner:v:.

I have no idea if these results are good or bad, but I half-expected less than 100 authors.

Getting useful information like spread of release dates is left as an exercise for the reader.

Woke up with the terrible idea of rewriting WebMake as a Gatsby plugin but

• I don’t even know who would know what I’m talking about
• I don’t know how to do that
• I’m just not sure how well this plan was thought through.

John Siracusa, on the Diving for Perl episode of the Command Line Heroes podcast:

My hope for Perl 5 is that people don’t dismiss it, because despite all the other more popular languages, there are still problems today to which Perl 5 is the best solution. Very often those are sort of glue type problems. If you find yourself ever writing a shell script, and you’re like, “Well, I’m not going to use my ‘real programming language’ for this.” Whether it’s Python, or Ruby, or whatever. But a shell script can let me connect together a bunch of stuff. Perl is a better tool for that job. It is easier to write a correct Perl script than it is to write a correct shell script.

Having written a few glue tasks with GNU Coreutils and some shell scripts, I agree with that point. Even just glueing together Coreutils can be easier with Perl.

And Perl 6:

That’s the great thing about open source, and programming languages. No one’s going to make you stop. You can just keep working on Perl 6 the same way you have been.

I won’t say whether I installed a fresh build of Rakudo and played around with Perl 6 after listening to the podcast, but — I installed a fresh build of Rakudo and played around with Perl 6 after listening to this episode.