Replied to https://mastodon.world/@luke_phys/109296783016276061 by Dr Luke DavisDr Luke Davis (mastodon.world)
Let’s test the hashtags! So I’m interested in and want to find out more about: #science #physics #linux #python #AI #London #EDI #STEM #BlackAcademics #Perl #Academia #Biophysics #biology #softmatter #modelling #simulation #nonfiction #reading #portraitart #math #geometry #algorithms #papers

Hi Luke! You should definitely check out the Perl posts on my blog (which is most of them 😉)!

This week’s Perl and Raku Conference 2022 in Houston was packed with great presentations, and I humbly added to them with a five-​ish minute lightning talk on two of Perl’s more misunderstood functions: map and grep.

Sorry about the um”s and ah”s…

I’ve written much about list processing in Perl, and this talk was based on the following blog posts:

Overall I loved attending the conference, and it really invigorated my participation in the Perl community. Stay tuned as I resume regular posting!

Update for Raku

On Twitter I nudged prominent Raku hacker (and recovered Perl hacker) Elizabeth Mattijsen to write about the Raku programming language’s map and grep functionality. Check out her five-​part series on DEV.to.

ground group growth hands

This past year of blogging has introduced me to a wide variety of people in the Perl community. Some I’ve admired from afar for years due to their published work, and even more I’ve met” interacting on social media and other forums. So this will be the first in an occasional series highlighting not just the code, but the people that make up the Perl family.

Paul LeoNerd” Evans

I first came across Paul’s work during his series last year on writing a core Perl feature; he’s responsible for Perl v5.32’s isa operator and v5.34’s experimental try/​catch exception handling syntax. I interviewed him about the latter for Perl.com in March 2021. He’s been active on CPAN for so much longer, though, and joined the Perl Steering Council in July. He’s also often a helpful voice on IRC.

Elliot Holden

Renowned author and trainer Randal L. merlyn” Schwartz linked over the weekend in a private Facebook group to Elliot’s impassioned YouTube video about his day job as a Perl web application developer. Through his alter ego Urban Guitar Legend Elliot is also a passionate musician; besides gigging and recording he’s been posting videos for nine years. (I’m a bit envious since I took a break from music almost twenty years ago and haven’t managed to recapture it.) Elliot seems like the quintessential needs-​to-​get-​shit-​done developer, and Perl is perfect for that.

Gábor Szabó

Gábor is a polyglot (both in human and computer languages) trainer, consultant, and author, writing about programming and devops on his Code Maven and Perl Maven websites. He’s also the founder and co-​editor of Perl Weekly and recipient of a Perl White Camel award in 2008 thanks to his organizational and support contributions. Last year he introduced me to the world of live pair programming, working on a web application using the Mojolicious framework.


If you’re on Twitter and looking to connect with other Perl developers, please consider participating in the Perl community I’ve set up there. Twitter Communities are topic-​specific moderated discussion groups, unlike the freewheeling #hashtags system that can be diluted by spam or topics that share the same name. Unfortunately, they’re still read-​only on the Twitter Android app, but you can participate fully on iOS/​iPadOS and the website.

I’m busy this week hosting my parents’ first visit to Houston, but I didn’t want to let this Tuesday go by without linking to my talk from last week’s Ephemeral Miniconf. Thanks so much to Thibault Duponchelle for organizing such a terrific event, to all the other speakers for coming together to present, and to everyone who attended for welcoming me.