I’m back to programming, rather than theologizing, for the next few weeks. Now I know I haven’t done much for a while, and so when today I wrote a bunch of subroutines which had more than the usual number of “goto” statements in them, I wondered whether I’d just lost my touch. But I don’t think so. I think in both cases, this is a rare “good” use of goto. Read more about Good uses of goto

For the past few months I’ve been meaning to get around to understanding PSGI and Plack; for various reasons, I guess. First, because it’s always good to keep abreast of what’s going on in the programming world; second, because they’re by Miyagawa, and really, anything by Miyagawa is worth looking into; third, because I’ve been writing a bunch of different web applications recently and wanted to know what the state of the art was. Read more about I finally get PSGI and Plack!

So this is a bit of a diversion from the whole theology thing, but… (This’ll probably confuse everyone on the CCBlogs site…)

In the missionary job, I’ve been setting up various web sites (including this one) and to make maintainence nice and easy, I’ve been using Drupal rather a lot. It’s a nice framework. One of the really nice things about it is that it’s very, very easy to install - untar the distribution into a directory on the web server, fill in some forms, and you have a new CMS. It really couldn’t be very much easier. If you get things wrong, it tells you what they are and how to fix it.

Coming back to Perl, I’ve been embarrassed at our web applications. Well, we have CPAN, which is a wonderful rich resource and people use CPAN modules liberally, as they should. But it does mean that deploying Perl web applications has required a lot of systems administration experience and often a lot of pain and aggravation.

So I’ve been working today on a Better Way, and I’m about 60% of the way there… Read more about Deploying Perl web applications

So I just enjoyed my first YAPC::Asia! It was good to see some of the old crowd again, both Japanese and foreigner, and also to see the huge interest in Perl from newer faces as well. Although I was not expecting to find the talks interesting - the less programming I do, the more I feel out of these things - there was a lot of good stuff on.

Last week I wrote:

Jesse set me a challenge: make Perl 6-style parameter handling work in Perl 5. Without source filters. This is hard. But not, as was earlier claimed, impossible. When people say things are impossible with Perl, it just makes me want to go on and do them.

OK, after a hiatus of, oh, about two years, (mainly caused by not having a Windows machine, and sort-of fixed by Boot Camp) I've picked up work on Songbee again.

Simon Wistow is right. I want to amplify and expand on some of what he said there.

We haven't had a technical post for a while, so let's have on: today I have been playing a little with porting Maypole to Perl 6. It's very nice, quite a lot cleaner than the Perl 5 implementation, although that may be the refactoring process coming into play - I've split off request and response objects, for instance.

So the current meme going around the Perl community looks like this: