Warszawa.pm - Biblioteczka (The Library)

W czwartek odbyło się spotkanie Warszawa.pm. Warta zanotowania jest inauguracja naszej biblioteczki - pożyczyłem od Piotrka Czynnik Ludzki. Dzięki!


Last Thursday there was a Warszawa.pm meeting. Worth noting is the inauguration of our library - Piotrek lended Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams to me. Thanks!

What are the features that Perl shares with Lisp?

The author of the famous Higher-Order Perl book (it's available for free download - so no excuse for those that have not yet read it) writes:

Perl is much more like Lisp than it is like C. If you pick up a good
book about Lisp, there will be a section that describes Lisp’s good features. For example, the book Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, by Peter Norvig, includes a section titled What Makes Lisp Different? that describes seven features of Lisp. Perl shares six of these features; C shares none of them. These are big, important features, features like first-class functions, dynamic access to the symbol table, and automatic storage management.

Dear lazy web: what are the other three features?

On naming things

One benefit that I have hope will be the result of the IronMan blogging challenge is that Perl people will get more expressive in describing their design. What I can see now is that often there is a strong belief that some code has a good or bad design but any inquiry into why said design is good or bad ends in a 'because you are stupid and you don't understand' argument. While I agree that coding can be sometimes more productive than discussing, I think this rule should not be treated absolutely. All design is trading one thing for another one, having this trade-off stated explicitly gives us the power to weight it intelligently and appropriately to circumstances. In contrast an unnamed intuition can be only an article of our faith in the designers skills.

There is power in naming things as the popularity of Design Patterns shows.

Stuff

Only remotely related to Perl.

Socio-Technical Systems

I like the definition from The Social Requirements of Technical Systems, now I have what CPAN realy is. I have not yet read the whole Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems but the rest seems rather dissapointing.

von Hippel

I recently discovered that most of his work is available on-line: Collected Papers, Downloadable Books. I recommend it to people trying to understand Open Source. He is much more 'technical' than Yochai Benkler. I've just finished reading Open Source Software and the 'Private-Collective' Innovation Model.

Rene Girard

I am working on a paper about on-line conflict in the light of mimetic theory.

Role that adds Traits to multiple classes

The DBIC model stuff naturally spans the whole FormHandler class tree - there are things that need to be added to the main form class, but also to the Field classes. An obvious example of the latter is the lookup_options method which loads data from the db table (ResultSet object more precisely) appropriate for the field into the field's options array. It does not really touch any global form stuff and:

$field->form->lookup_options( $field, ... )

is like reaching with your left hand to your right pocket. I mean really awkward. So what we need is a form role that would add other roles to the fields classes. I imagined that this could be possible, in theory a role could be a hierarchy that would be applied to a class hierarchy - but I don't think you can do that with current Moose, so instead I used a hook in the method that builds fields and added there code to inject an appropriate Trait.

The code is in new branches in the main HTML::FormHandler repo and in the HTML::FormHandler::Model::DBIC repo. I am waiting for commetns. I would think that this is not something unusual - so I guess others must have already solved similar problems before - I would like to hear what they did.

We have a similar problem with rendering. It is a role now so that it can be easily replaced, but it is naturally recursive, fields should know how to render themselves so we need a way to apply a whole set of roles in one sweep to the whole form class structure. It looks like there really is some abstract super-role in there.
How much is it monkey patching, how much is it action at a distance?