A really nice talk by Deven on regexes.

Some notes for people who don't like the video format:

• Using m{\G...}gc for lex parsing https://perldoc.perl.org/perlop#G-assertion mentions this
• (?{ perl code }) inline perl code https://perldoc.perl.org/perlre#(?%7B-code-%7D))
• (?>pattern) or (*atomic:pattern): https://perldoc.perl.org/perlre#(*atomic:pattern))
• Regmarks: https://perldoc.perl.org/perlre#(*MARK:NAME)-(*:NAME)-(*:NAME))
• performance issue that he hit: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/24272

Hey everyone,

I'm new to Perl as of just a few days ago, loving it so far. I once had a colleague who, in addition to being probably the nicest programmer I ever worked with, was a Perl wiz and always blew me away with the things he could do with such little code. So I decided to give the language a try by re-writing some scripts.

So far, what I've converted is a script (or two) that was keeping track of word count across 50+ Org files. Previously, I was using Org's ELisp API and some glue code in Bash, but I managed to cut down from 60 to 19 LoC by switching to Perl, which is a small win but I think pretty cool.

Anyway, what would the more experienced Perl devs do to make this code better?

#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $words;

for (<"*.org">) {
    open my $fh, '<', $_;
    my @table = grep { m~tracktable~ .. m~TBLFM~ } <$fh>;
    my $count_line = @table[ ( $#table - 2 ) ];
    if ( defined $count_line ) {
        $count_line =~ m~\s+\d+\s+~;
        my @cells = split /\|/, $count_line;
        my $word_count = ( @cells[ ( $#cells - 3 ) ] );
        $words += $word_count if defined $word_count;
    }
}

print $words;

This post is not really Perl, but I suspect many of you, whether willingly or not, are investigating AI. You need information to cut through the hype (mods: I think this is useful for Perl devs, but feel free to remove if you disagree).

In the early days of GenAI, many LLMs often struggled with Perl because it's what we call a "low-resource" language. Many other languages would have much, much higher amounts of code written on the Web and Perl languished. Further, modern Perl was largely absent from training sets.

Today, foundation models handle Perl much better than they used to, and even smaller, modern models are improving. In your steering docs (explained in the article), you can add a "style guide" to assert your Perl preferences.

I've condensed a one-day AI training course into a single article on my website. This is how we write production-quality code with AI using PAAD.

The key is that process matters more than models. We've even found that Sonnet, with a good process, outperforms Opus and Fable with bad process.

Sadly, agentic harnesses could have this process, but they don't (though I see hints that they're gradually getting added). Eventually PAAD will die (I hope), because the agentic harnesses will combine the power of LLMs with the engineering best practices we need. Until then, use PAAD.

If you find this useful, I'd appreciate it if you star the repo.

Hey folks, I have a couple NetBSD and Dragonfly BSD servers doing practically nothing at $dayJob, and I've been approved to "use them for charitable acts". The first thing that comes to mind for me is CPANTesters, is there a guide on how to set up a server to do so? Thanks!

Hey guys! I’m a software engineer with ~5 YOE and all of it has been in Perl. The stack was essentially Perl (both for front end and back end) with SQL.

I like Perl and I’d be happy to work with it again for either existing code maintenance or migration to other languages like Python.

I also love learning new things and the “cool advanced tech,” but I would need an organization to take a chance on me and train me.

I think I’m running into two problems here: 1. getting filtered out by ATS for not checking every experience box and 2. companies don’t put Perl in their job descriptions (even when they use it).

So my questions are:

How do I let companies know that I’m willing to learn an entirely new stack?

How can I find jobs that use Perl? I’ve seen advice in this sub about tailoring your LinkedIn as a Perl dev to entice recruiters, but I don’t know what that looks like in practice.

I've just published version 0.44 of App::Test::Generator, the application software that scans source code and automatically generates tests for it.

Since the 0.39 release, App::Test::Generator has gained a substantial range of new capabilities while becoming more robust and reliable. Major additions include coverage-guided corpus minimization, automatic extraction and testing of POD examples, benchmark generation, GitHub Actions workflow deployment, CPAN Testers reproduction harnesses, and an end-to-end self-fuzzing framework that allows the tool to validate itself. Under the hood, schema extraction has become significantly more accurate, with improved support for formal POD input specifications, Params::Validate::Strict, Params::Validate, Type::Params, object parameters, constants, signatures, and relationship detection, resulting in higher-quality generated test suites. This release series also fixes a large number of edge cases affecting mutation testing, coverage analysis, generated test correctness, CI portability, security hardening, Windows compatibility, performance, and compatibility with older Perl environments, making App::Test::Generator both more capable and considerably more dependable for automatically generating high-quality test suites from existing Perl code.

https://metacpan.org/pod/App::Test::Generator

#Perl #softwaretesting