There's no Place Like ::1

Next week I will fly to Copenhagen, Denmark to participate at the YAPC::EU::2008. This year’s conference theme is Beautiful Perl. Although I think Perl can be used to make beautiful things, I never thought Perl code is or can be beautiful, even when I did Perl on a daily basis.

Being at 2 YAPC conferences (Braga and Birmingham), I quickly realized how great the Perl community is, and even though I don’t find Perl interesting anymore, I always look forward to meet great people and great minds at YAPCs.

I also took the opportunity to submit a talk that eventually got accepted. So on Thursday, 14th, I’ll be talking about Makefile::Parallel again. I hope that the talk can ignite some interesting discussions, and to gather some ideas about possible directions of the module.

It will be my first time too in Copenhagen and Denmark, so I’m really looking forward to know the city! If you are reading this and will attend to YAPC, get in touch with me and maybe I’ll buy you a beer :-) (I’m root (at) cpan)

It seems that a new war started out there. Google launched the Google AppEngine platform, supporting Python and Django out of the box.

On they Google project page, people started to “vote” for the next language to be implemented. It seems that the more “stars” a language has, the more attention it will get from Google.

So pick your favorite programming language, and “star” it on the issue list!

(oh and if you don’t have a favorite language, pick Ruby :-))

My first social meeting with the Ruby-PT community will happen tomorrow at Lisbon!

Bring a friend! Perl/PHP haters are more than welcome :)

I never liked the TDD technique. It was too much XP(Extreme Programming) for me. There are people that are just convicted that TDD is the best development technique since sliced bread!

Recently, I’ve been watching alternative development techniques. One that caught my attention was BDD (wikipedia). The basic idea is that one should question and write the expected behaviour of the application, creating a specification that guides the development process.

There are many helper tools available to integrate this kind of behaviour tests in your favourite language. Since I am becoming a Ruby fan, I looked at RSpec:

RSpec is a a framework which provides programmers with a Domain Specific Language to describe the behaviour of Ruby code with readable, executable examples that guide you in the design process and serve well as both documentation and test.

The examples on the RSpec webpage shows a slick and natural DSL for describing behaviour specifications. Try them! So natural, so practical, so clean…. I’m in love! And if you are a Rails addict, you must know that on the same RSpec webpage, there is a plugin you can use to integrate RSpec tests and ActiveRecord helpers in you favourite Rails application!! SWEET!!

Oh and it is incredibly simple to extend RSpec with your own matchers. And I even didn’t talk about Mocks and Stubs! So much things to explore… At the end, BDD could not be the answer for all your testing requisites, but IMHO it is a serious candidate for my future applications’ tests.

PS – Do you know any BDD framework for Perl applications?!

This will be the first of many articles about why mac os sucks for the everyday developer work…

I’m mainly working with Perl now, and I started to have problems as soon as I went to mac os. The modules I was used to work with started to fail on mac os. After some digging I found that every failure was related with some string format problem.

For example, I discovered that this expression sprintf '%f' 0.3 gives you the string 0,300000 and not the “expected” 0.300000. You can’t imagine how this thing breaks some Perl modules…

Then I realized that my locale settings were defined to C. Clearly that could be a problem. Google helped me a bit, and I found this website that has instructions on how to prepare your mac os to the correct locale and unicode settings.

A little bit of hacking later (I set my new locale to en_US.UTF-8), a new bash from macports, and sprintf started to behave “correctly”, and Perl modules no longer complain :-) Great success!