Tag: Perl.com

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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.

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The Java world had an… inter­est­ing week­end when secu­ri­ty researchers revealed on December 9 a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in the pop­u­lar Apache Log4j 2 soft­ware library for record­ing and debug­ging events. Systems as diverse as Amazon Web Services, Apple iCloud, and the Minecraft video game could be exploit­ed to run arbi­trary code on a serv­er mere­ly by send­ing a specially-​crafted string of text. Information tech­nol­o­gy pro­fes­sion­als have been scram­bling ever since the ini­tial dis­clo­sure to patch, upgrade, recon­fig­ure, or oth­er­wise pro­tect affect­ed servers. It’s bad, and past unpatched vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties like this have been respon­si­ble for the expo­sure of mil­lions of people’s sen­si­tive data.

Many Perl appli­ca­tions use the similarly-​named and ‑designed Log::Log4perl library, and the good news is that as far as I can tell the lat­ter doesn’t suf­fer from the type of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty described above. This doesn’t mean poorly-​written or ‑con­fig­ured Perl-​based sys­tems are immune to all exploits, just this par­tic­u­lar one. You should be safe to con­tin­ue using Log4perl unless some­one has delib­er­ate­ly con­fig­ured it oth­er­wise, and in fact, my work uses it extensively.

You might be sur­prised to read me sug­gest­ing a log­ging frame­work after writ­ing mul­ti­ple arti­cles espous­ing the Perl step debug­ger as an alter­na­tive. Log4perl devel­op­er Mike Schilli’s 2002 intro­duc­tion to the pack­age for Perl.com came down on the oppo­site side of the argu­ment. It can seem like one of those pro­gram­mer reli­gious issues like tabs vs. spaces, vim vs. Emacs, or Linux vs. Windows. (For the record, the cor­rect answers are spaces, BBEdit, and macOS. 😉)

But in this case, you can and should have the best of both worlds—logging at dif­fer­ent lev­els to appro­pri­ate des­ti­na­tions while still drop­ping into the inter­ac­tive debug­ger when you need to do some­thing trick­i­er like exam­ine pro­gram state or tweak a data struc­ture on the fly. I use both tech­niques and only empha­size the advo­ca­cy of step debug­ging because it’s under­stood less.