Dave Sherohman

I've started a long-past-due update of the "Work" section of this site, expanding substantially on the description of my freelance work and adding links to the long and short versions of my CV/resume. A project portfolio, code samples, and information on my involvement in the broader software development community should also be coming within the next few days.

Marc Mims has recently taken over maintainership of Net::Twitter and rebuilt it on top of Moose. This has been a cause of much concern for me, as it does not appear that the non-Moose Net::Twitter::Lite will meet my needs. Yesterday's Net::Twitter Roadmap post proved quite reassuring in that regard, but did not fully address my concerns. As Marc's blog does not appear to support comments, I am posting my thoughts on it here.

In the last couple weeks, I've seen Perl questions on at least two separate forums which revolved around the connection between .pm files and Perl packages. Really, though, this connection is quite easy to understand if you just remember one thing:

It doesn't exist.

When designing the custom theme that I'm using for this and the other sherohman.org Drupal sites, I took a look at the theme I was using as my baseline example ("Basic", by Raincity Studios) and found that I wanted to place some of the site's blocks in locations which it didn't support. This proved easy to do and here's how to do it:

Noting my post on how the web was lost, Sam Crawley has asked "Can Perl ever regain its reputation?", ending with:

Yes, it does matter, not only for emotional and stubborn reasons, but also for rational and pragmatic ones.

There was a time when Perl, operating through CGI, ruled the web as king of dynamic sites. Things have changed quite a bit since then. Perl has grown to become a much stronger language, but it has also fallen from favor and lingers in the broader software development community's eye primarily as a whipping boy to be brought out only as a source of horror.

How did this happen?

We do have a legacy of poorly-structured, obfuscated, insecure Perl 4 code to overcome, which doesn't help matters any. This is being addressed by the "Modern Perl" and "Enlightened Perl" camps, including the Enlightened Perl Iron Man Challenge which I am participating in, and their efforts to show that it's not only possible, but easy to write well-structured, maintainable, elegant code in Perl 5. CPAN provides us a wealth of development frameworks, reusable objects, and everything else that today's developers expect to find in a language, and Modern/Enlightened Perl encourage heavy use of them.

They say that writing your own templating system is one of Perl's standard rites of passage. I wrote mine near the end of 2002, long before I had heard anyone say that. It was also before I became familiar with CPAN, so I didn't know what was already out there.

Oddly enough, I still use it. It works well enough for the needs of the project I wrote it for, so there hasn't been any real reason to rip it out and replace it, but I haven't used it in any other projects either. Instead, I've gone through a couple others and just this week have changed my preferences once again.

I've taken an interest in writing some customized interface code to give me better control over my twitter feed and this program is my first move in that direction. Its basic function is to watch for tweets from the people you follow which contain tags from a list of tags that interest you.

I have just been informed by PerlMonks that I have been there for "7 enlivening years."

In that time, I've learned far more about Perl than I had initially realized there was to learn. I've drifted away from the site several times, but always returned when I either hit a snag or just had some time to burn and wanted to find an interesting conversation to follow.

As luck would have it, the timing of my decision to shift the focus of my technically-focused writing from my US company's site to this one coincided perfectly with Matt Trout's declaration of the Enlightened Perl Iron Man Competition. As I am a long-time Perl fan and would like to see it continue to grow and thrive into the future, I will naturally be taking part.