While I was at YAPC::NA this year, I got a chance to catch up with a few old friends and talk with some really knowledgeable people from other parts of the Perl programming community. One such discussion started when Rob Kinyon told me that exceptions are fundamentally flawed by design and should never be used.… Read More »
At the end of 2008, I did a series of posts arguing that SVG still lives despite predictions of it’s downfall. I had been hearing these dire predictions for years, and wanted to provide a decent rebuttal: Reports of SVG’s death exaggerated. Last year, I had the good fortune to go to SVG Open 2009.… Read More »
I just got back from YAPC::NA 2010. As usual, the presentations were great and the people were better. At last year’s YAPC, I had the good fortune to attend a talk by Karen Pauley entitled Remote Controlled Volunteers. It’s not the kind of talk I would normally look for, but I thought I would check… Read More »
In my last post, I talked about a quick little project that has grown into experimenting with several new tools/processes. I finally got a reasonable release out on CPAN as SVG::Sparkline version 0.30. This version supports 6 different sparkline types: Area, Bar, Line, RangeArea, RangeBar, and Whisker. It also has better documentation in the form… Read More »
For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a Perl module for creating Sparklines* in SVG. The original purpose of the project was a demonstration of working with SVG from the Perl programming language. It was intended to be an example in a talk I was going to give for our local Perl Mongers… Read More »
I was listening to an older episode of Software Engineering Radio where they interviewed Martin Odersky on Scala (Episode 62). In the interview, Odersky made a comment about closures being the literals of functional programming. This statement struck me as surprising. The more I thought about it, the more interesting and subtle the concept became.… Read More »
Yesterday, I wrote an essay on a comment made in Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horrors blog about regular expressions. While Atwood spends quite a bit of time on the two problems joke and talks passionately about regexes as a tool, he does take a swipe at the Perl programming language that seemed somewhat uncalled for. I… Read More »
As a short break from my normal programming oriented blog entries, I figured I should comment about YAPC::NA 2007 which we (Houston.pm) are hosting. The conference is currently running (June 25 – 27) at University of Houston, Central Campus. Eight-ish months ago, Jeremy Fluhmann talked us into putting in a bid for YAPC. Despite quite… Read More »
Back in September, Mark Dominus wrote a commentary describing his take on Design Patterns. Although I am impressed with a lot of what MJD has written in the past, I wasn’t sure what to make of this one. Ralph Johnson of Design Patterns fame responded and MJD wrote again. I encourage you to read all… Read More »
Higher Order Perl Mark Jason Dominus Morgan Kaufmann, 2005 The simplest thing you can say about MJD’s Higher Order Perl, is that it is not your ordinary, everyday programming book. It is not even your everyday Perl programming book. MJD introduces an approach to programming that will be new to most programmers. Even those who… Read More »