Yes, I know this is not a place to rant, nor is this place to talk bad about other languages, but heck, I am going to rant anyways....

So I started my scripting journey (short and irregular) with Perl. It enabled me to write scripts pretty fast with least knowledge of the language in particular and programming in general. Job requirements made me take a long break from Perl and Scripting. I started learning Python, not because I had to write scripts, but to "check mark" a training requirement. It's a good language, nothing against it. I was happy on the learning journey, until a requirement came up to automate some alerts and that is when my troubles started.

The client for which I was to do the automation has strict internet access policies, so no access to the internet from the servers used for environment management. Also, no admin access. I had promised to automate some stuff (my bad, I should have first checked the requirements). Python would not install, not even within the directories for my account. I was at wit's end. I tried downloading again thinking may be the file got corrupted, but same result. My colleague managed to install it for his servers (different client) but kept getting errors while trying to send out emails. So we both were kind of upset and pissed off.

And then I remembered, Strawberry Perl. Downloaded it, pushed the installer to the servers (Yes, I again had to raise a request for that as well, and no they would not allow any special permissions). To my amazement, it installed without any errors!!. And every conceivable module I wanted was there!!

This was two days ago...just now finished writing the scripts, sent a test email to myself, then sent it to the required DL Email. Informed my manager and the concerned client folks and they were all happy!!

Now for my colleague, he too installed the same, I helped him out with the scripts, and I dunnowhathappened, but the emails just worked with Perl. Yeah this sounds stupid, but it didnt work with Python, but , it worked with Perl!!

Also I found that, for Perl, there are two kind of Email Modules, Ones that "create"/"format" Email and the others you use to "send" emails. Some modules may have both, and I could be wrong, but what I really liked is the modularity given here.

May be I did something wrong while trying to install Python, may be not, I am not sure. May be I was stupid. But, end of the day, it was Perl that saved the day.

So thank you Perl, Thank you Perl Developers and especially Strawberry Perl Team for saving the day.

Rant Over.

Dear suPerlatives,

Allow me to introduce Intramine, an intranet service suite for Windows done in Strawberry Perl and JavaScript that provides sub-second local search of your half a million or more source and text files, among other things.

Some other things:

• five-second index update when you change a file, to keep searches current
• automatic linking for all source and text and image file mentions, with minimal overhead (often none)
• a really nice file Viewer to browse your files, and see search hits in full context (plus that automatic linking)
• image hovers in your source and text files
• Gloss, a markdown variant specifically for intranet use that takes advantage of autolinking and minimizes "computer friendly" overhead
• scalable services: write your own IntraMine service, with or without a front end, and run multiple instances that can talk to other services
• Search, Viewer, and Linker service support for 137 programming languages, as well as plain text
• all original work is covered by an UNLICENSE.

For a README and downloads see

https://github.com/KLB7/IntraMine

Cheers,

KLB7

at intramine.info

Max Keiser: Yeah I think the COVID-19 is written in Perl, and the flu is written in C++.

Keiser Report E1520 Gold: Problems with Exchange for Physical
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPGmut6_TEk&t=9m23s

TODO

Implement the rest of the transformations (cropping, rotating etc).

I needed to non-proportionally scale animated GIFs and implemented type=>nonprop in the scale method. Other desirable features include crop, watermark, and sharpening. Please share your mods and methods here.

TODO:

perl -MImager::GIF -le 'for (keys %INC) { print $INC{$_} if /GIF\.pm/ 
+}'
[download]

sub scale {
    my ($self, %args) = @_;
    my $ratio = $args{scalefactor} // 1;
    my $qtype = $args{qtype} // 'mixing'; # add qtype support
    
    $self->_mangle(sub {
  
        my $img = shift;
        my $ret = $img->scale(%args, qtype => $qtype);
        my $h = $img->tags(name => 'gif_screen_height');
        my $w = $img->tags(name => 'gif_screen_width');
        
# add non-proportional scaling
        if (
        $args{xpixels} and
        $args{ypixels} and
        $args{type}    and
        $args{type} eq 'nonprop') {
            
            my $xratio
            = defined $args{xpixels}
            ? $args{xpixels} / $w
            : $ratio;
            
            my $yratio
            = defined $args{ypixels}
            ? $args{ypixels} / $w
            : $ratio;

            $ret->settag(name => 'gif_left',
                        value => int($xratio * $img->tags(name => 'gif
+_left')));
            $ret->settag(name => 'gif_top',
                        value => int($yratio * $img->tags(name => 'gif
+_top')));
            $ret->settag(name => 'gif_screen_width',  value => int($xr
+atio * $w));
            $ret->settag(name => 'gif_screen_height', value => int($yr
+atio * $h));
        }
        else {
# proportional scaling, from the original
            unless ($ratio) {
                if (defined $args{xpixels}) {
                    $ratio = $args{xpixels} / $w;
                }
                if (defined $args{ypixels}) {
                    $ratio = $args{ypixels} / $h;
                }
            }
            $ret->settag(name => 'gif_left',
                         value => int($ratio * $img->tags(name => 'gif
+_left')));
            $ret->settag(name => 'gif_top',
                         value => int($ratio * $img->tags(name => 'gif
+_top')));
            $ret->settag(name => 'gif_screen_width',  value => int($ra
+tio * $w));
            $ret->settag(name => 'gif_screen_height', value => int($ra
+tio * $h));
        }
        return $ret;
    });
}
[download]

Uni: Query the Unicode database from the CLI...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21777025

Identify a character:

uni €
€ - U+020AC - EURO SIGN

uni -c h€ý
h - U+00068 - LATIN SMALL LETTER H
€ - U+020AC - EURO SIGN
ý - U+000FD - LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH ACUTE

uni /euro/
₠ - U+020A0 - EURO-CURRENCY SIGN
€ - U+020AC - EURO SIGN
𐡷 - U+10877 - PALMYRENE LEFT-POINTING FLEURON
𐡸 - U+10878 - PALMYRENE RIGHT-POINTING FLEURON
𐫱 - U+10AF1 - MANICHAEAN PUNCTUATION FLEURON
🌍 - U+1F30D - EARTH GLOBE EUROPE-AFRICA
🏤 - U+1F3E4 - EUROPEAN POST OFFICE
🏰 - U+1F3F0 - EUROPEAN CASTLE
💶 - U+1F4B6 - BANKNOTE WITH EURO SIGN

uni globe earth
🌍 - U+1F30D - EARTH GLOBE EUROPE-AFRICA
🌎 - U+1F30E - EARTH GLOBE AMERICAS
🌏 - U+1F30F - EARTH GLOBE ASIA-AUSTRALIA

uni -u 2042
⁂ - U+02042 - ASTERISM

uni -u 2042 2043 2044
⁂ - U+02042 - ASTERISM
⁃ - U+02043 - HYPHEN BULLET
⁄ - U+02044 - FRACTION SLASH

Anyway my meditation consists of encouraging Perl programmers to announce their wares on Hacker News, and other such websites.

https://news.ycombinator.com/news

I do this so often my ~/bin has over 1000 programs and modules. One of these days I would like to upload them somewhere if it's not too complicated. Until then I am a one man CPAN ;-)

My projects include command line programs, web apps, search engines, linguistic analysis, os enhancement, graphics, data visualization, and making Perl easier to use by exposing its buried treasures.

What are you doing with Perl?

https://old.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/dq1lzy/the_perl_masterplan/f65h3t6/

The official Perl documentation site at https://perldoc.perl.org was recently overhauled. Independently, I put together a reimagined documentation site that would be hosted at https://perldoc.pl. In the interest of providing a documentation site that best serves the needs of the Perl community, we need your feedback. Please give both sites a try, in-depth if you want, or just how you would most commonly use the site. What do you like about the design or the functionality of each site? What is missing or can be improved? Any feedback regarding what you want from the Perl documentation site is helpful and appreciated. Please leave comments here or in the linked posts by Monday Nov 18th.

blogs.perl.org comments

Reddit comments

I was writing a Perl version of a Python version of a Mac-centric Shell version of a BASIC program when there was a node about unequal treatment and I noticed that my finished perl and the original BASIC were both exactly 23 lines including the comment line added to each program and I could make an interesting node with a cute title that is a direct hyperlink to the source:

Perl

# https://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node=equal+treatment
system 'clear';
print "Hello there. I'm a computer. What's your name? ";
chomp($_ = <STDIN>);
print "Hello ".$_.". You are welcome to computer land.";

while () {
  print "What would you like to do today?
  1) Say something random
  2) Make a maze
  3) Exit
  Enter your selection ";
  chomp($_ = <STDIN>);
  if    (/1/) {
    system 'say', do {
      @_ = split /\n/, do{local(@ARGV,$/)="/usr/share/dict/words";<>};
      $_[int rand@_]
    }
  }
  elsif (/2/) { print rand() < 0.5 ? '/' : '\\' for 1..3000 }
  elsif (/3/) { print "Bye"; exit }
  else        { print "Try again." }
}
[download]

Python

# https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20127987
import os
import random
import sys

os.system("clear")
print "Hello there. I'm a computer. What's your name?"
G = raw_input()
print "Hello " + G + ". You are welcome to computer land."

while True:
    print ""
    print "What would you like to do today?"
    print "1) Say something random"
    print "2) Make a maze"
    print "3) Exit"
    print "Enter your selection"
    S = raw_input()
    if S == "1":
        F = open("/usr/share/dict/words").readlines()
        W = random.choice(F)
        os.system("say {}".format(W))
    elif S == "2":
        for i in range(1, 3000):
            if random.random()>0.5:
                sys.stdout.write("/")
            else: 
                sys.stdout.write("\\")
    elif S == "3":
        print "Bye."
        exit()
    else:
        print "Try again."
[download]

Shell

# https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20123365
clear
echo "Hello there. I'm a computer. What's your name?"
read G
echo "Hello $G. You are welcome to computer land."

while true
do
echo ""
echo "What would you like to do today?"
echo "1) Say something random"
echo "2) Make a maze"
echo "3) Exit"
echo "Enter your selection"
read S
  if [ "$S" = "1" ]; then
    echo $( head -n $((7*RANDOM)) /usr/share/dict/words | tail -n 1 )
  elif [ "$S" = "2" ]; then
    for i in {1..3000}; do
      if (($RANDOM>16384)); then printf '/'; else printf '\'; fi
    done
  elif [ "$S" = "3" ]; then
    echo "Bye."
    exit 
  else 
    echo "Try again." 
  fi
done
[download]

BASIC

REM https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118639
5 CLS
7 RANDOMIZE TIMER
10 PRINT "Hello there. I'm a computer. What is your name?"
20 INPUT G$
30 PRINT "Hello "+G$+". You are welcome to computer land."
40 PRINT "What would you like to do today?"
50 PRINT "1) Make noises"
60 PRINT "2) Make a maze"
70 PRINT "3) Exit"
80 PRINT "Enter your selection:"
100 INPUT S$
110 IF S$="1" GOTO 200
120 IF S$="2" GOTO 300
130 IF S$="3" GOTO 400
140 PRINT "Try again."
150 GOTO 40
200 SOUND 20+(RND*20000), RND*3
210 GOTO 200
300 SCREEN 1
310 IF RND>.5 THEN PRINT "/"; ELSE PRINT "\";
320 GOTO 310
400 PRINT "Bye."
[download]

cat hello.pl | perl -ne '$_=join"",<STDIN>;@_=$_=~/[^A-Za-z0-9\s]/g;print@_'; echo""

'';".'.'?";($_=<>);"".$_."..";(){"?)))";($_=<>);(//){'',{@_=/\/,{(@,$/)="////";<>};$_[@_]}}(//){()<.?'/':'\\'..}(//){"";}{"."}}


cat hello.py | perl -ne '$_=join"",<STDIN>;@_=$_=~/[^A-Za-z0-9\s]/g;print@_'; echo""

.("")".'.'?"=_()""++"..":"""?"")"")"")"""=_()=="":=("////").()=.().("{}".())=="":(,):.()>.:..("/"):..("\\")=="":"."():"."

cat hello.sh | perl -ne '$_=join"",<STDIN>;@_=$_=~/[^A-Za-z0-9\s]/g;print@_'; echo""

".'.'?""$..""""?"")"")"")"""["$"=""];$(-$((*))////|-)["$"=""];{..};(($>));'/';'\';["$"=""];".""."

cat hello.bas | perl -ne '$_=join"",<STDIN>;@_=$_=~/[^A-Za-z0-9\s]/g;print@_'; echo""

".'.?"$""+$+"..""?"")"")"")"":"$$=""$=""$="""."+(*),*>."/";"\";"."

use Inline Python => <<'END';
# paste the py code here and run under perl! =)
END
[download]

I guess replace "say" with "print" ("echo" for shell) if $^O ne 'darwin'

So you install the Foo::Bar module and try again and see Can't locate Bar/Baz.pm in @INC (you may need to install the Bar::Baz module) (@INC contains: ...

So you install the Bar::Baz module and the application runs.

Module::Load::Conditional (core) can reduce the pain to:

Install required modules Foo::Bar Bar::Baz from CPAN? (y)/n y
Use 1. cpan or 2. cpanm 1/(2) 2
Successfully installed Foo::Bar
Successfully installed Bar::Baz

Install required perl modules:
cpan Foo::Bar Bar::Baz 
cpanm -v Foo::Bar Bar::Baz 

Can't locate Foo::Bar Bar::Baz in @INC (@INC contains: ...

Should monks adopt this mess or fold it into a module so it becomes a best practice?

How could this idea be improved?

Thank you!

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

#use Foo::Bar;
#use Bar::Baz;

use Module::Load::Conditional 'can_load';
BEGIN { my $modules = [ map {$_} qw[
IPC::Cmd
Foo::Bar
Bar::Baz
]];

my @install = do { local @_;
  for my $m (@$modules) { push @_, $m
  unless can_load(modules => {$m,undef},
  autoload => 1)} @_
};

@install and do {
  print 'Install required modules ',
  join(' ', @install), ' from CPAN? (y)/n ';
  
  my $in = <STDIN>; chomp $in; $in ||= 'y';
  my $cpanm = IPC::Cmd::can_run('cpanm');

  if (lc $in eq 'y') {
    if ($cpanm) {

      print 'Use 1. cpan or 2. cpanm 1/(2) ';

      my $cpan = do { local $_ = <STDIN>; chomp $_; $_ ||= 2;
      $_ = 2 unless /^1|2$/; $_ };

      if ($cpan == 2) {
        unless (system $cpanm, '-v', @install) {
          system 'perl', $0, @ARGV;
          exit
        }
      }
    }
    unless (system 'cpan', @install) {
      system 'perl', $0, @ARGV;
      exit
    }
  }
  else{
    die "Install required perl modules:\n".
    join ' ', 'cpan',  @install, "\n".
    ($cpanm ? join(' ', 'cpanm', @install) : '')."\n\n".
    "Can't locate ".join(' ',@install).' in @INC '.
    '(@INC contains: '.join(' ', @INC).") \n"
  }
};

Bar::Baz->import('Something')}
[download]

19 core libs can not be simply used, without being fatal, so they're commented out (ymmv on versions ne 5.26.2).

The perl interpreter grows to about 150 megabytes.

A series of warnings is printed which may or may not have any value. This is why I'm sharing it here. In case the warnings indicate real issues, or interesting things to investigate.

This 1-liner generates the ~650 line script, redirects stdout to the file "useallcore" and runs "perl useallcore" which prints the errors, and lines from ps about the perl process.

perl -MExtUtils::Installed -MModule::Metadata -e '$not=q/_charnames|au
+touse|blib|charnames|Devel::Peek|encoding|encoding::warnings|feature|
+File::Spec::VMS|filetest|GDBM_File|if|O|ok|open|Pod::Simple::Debug|so
+rt|Thread|threads/;$not={map{$_=>1}split/\|/,$not};print"#!/usr/bin/p
+erl\n# Load all core Perl modules, pragmas and extensions\n# Exceptio
+ns, to prevent errors:\n".(join "\n", map {"#$_"} sort {lc$a cmp lc$b
+} keys %$not).")\n\n";@_=grep/\.pm/,(ExtUtils::Installed->files("Perl
+"));for(@_){$m=Module::Metadata->new_from_file($_)->{module} or next;
+push@m,$m}for(sort{lc$a cmp lc$b}@m){print $not->{$_}?"#":"","use $_;
+\n"}print"\nprint `ps -v | grep \"\$\$\"`;\n"' > useallcore; perl use
+allcore
[download]