Paul Kulchenko: perl

Brandon Lee says about Perl: "As Damian Conway says: "Line noise programs, numerous defaults, subtle context propagation, symbolic references, closures, unconstrained OO model, one-liners, weird modules maintained by weirder hackers, typeglobs, AUTOLOADING, operator overloading, source filters, etc., etc." Aargh! But, but, but ... when you start working with Perl, there is a generosity about the language that is unique. It is not verbose hackery but something like a corpulent (voluptuous?) hedonist that is living a little too comfortably. So don't eat just the bone or the meat, take the fat and the tendons and the liver and a little Perl." Amen. That's why I'm as much excited about Perl as I was ten years ago when I start using it.

Perl Foundation Announced Availability of Perl 5.8. "It features better support for cutting-edge computing platforms, unrivaled ability to deal with international character sets and numerous new modules and performance enhancements. In addition, the Perl community's new QA systems enhance Perl's existing reputation as a world-beating development tool with enterprise-class robustness, a reputation that has seen it included in the default installs of Apple's Mac OS X and Sun's Solaris 9. Improvements include overhauled 64 bit support, enhanced Unicode awareness, better large number support, improved threading, regular expressions and IO and some 3000 uploads to the CPAN."

Jeffrey Friedl
Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition

What's New with Regular Expressions. "Whether you program in Perl or Java or VB.NET or Python or PHP or C# or Ruby or any language with regular-expression support, I hope and believe that the second edition will provide you with a wealth of practical information and helpful examples."

Simon Fell: "No doubt the first of many dumb questions about OS X". I don't think it's a dumb question ("how to implement web service in AppleScript") ;). This list of SOAP toolkits says that AppleScript is a 'client only' implementation and I believe that's correct (let me know if you find otherwise). You can use SOAP::Lite (or some other toolkit) to run as a server and developer.apple.com plans to publish Randal Schwartz's article 'Connecting AppleScript and Perl with SOAP' that describes how to do that (sorry, no live link yet).

Newly improved and redesigned mod_perl site with new slick look. Lincoln Stein on mod_perl: "mod_perl is more than CGI scripting on steroids. It is a whole new way to create dynamic content by utilizing the full power of the Apache web server to create stateful sessions, customized user authentication systems, smart proxies and much more. Yet, magically, your old CGI scripts will continue to work and work very fast indeed. With mod_perl you give up nothing and gain so much!" I'm sure you know that already, right?

Allison Randal, Damian Conway: Synopsis 5. "Just as you can have anonymous subs and named subs you can have anonymous regexes and named regexes:"

 rule ident { [<alpha>|_] \w* }
 # and later...
 @ids = grep /<ident>/, @strings;
 # and then refer to named regexes, such as:
 rule serial_number { <[A-Z]> \d<8> }
 rule type { alpha | beta | production | deprecated | legacy }

Neat and slightly shocking (for someone who's been doing Perl for eight years) syntax.