Why I like Perl

Perl is ammenable to the most disgusting yet fulfilling hacks I've ever had to make in my quest to transfer an idea from the half-bakery of thought into the concrete, if ugly, kingdom of the useful. My two greatest examples of this are my Hate-o-meter mpg123 wrapper and the time I wanted to store a massive hash of things in C but rather than write my own implementation muddled though with an embedded perl interpreter and some glue into a perl's hashes.

Articles and talks I've written on Perl.

• Charting Data Use of Chart modules in Antarctica.
• Running Away to C - London Perl Wo rkshop slides on C, Perl and XS (also Powe rpoint).
• There's more than one world in which to do it [Perl.com] Quantum::Entanglement article.
• The lighter side of CPAN [Perl.com] A tour of Perl's silly side. This article also found its way onto Slashdot which was nice.
• How Perl powers Christmas [Perl.com] A look at how lapland schedules festivities with Perl.

Public Perl, done by me, thus far.

Check::UnitCheck

• Latest Version

A bit of XS magic to let you use the best of CHECK or UNITCHECK depending on the perl version you're using.

Quantum::Entanglement

• Latest Version
• There's more than one world in which to do it article on perl.com
• Quantum mechanical hangman
• Paper presented to YAPC::EU
• My reputation is battered by another appearance on slashdot.

Damian Conway wrote the excellent Quantum::Superpositions module, this just didn't seem physical enough, so I wrote Quantum::Entanglement.

Data::Dimensions

• Module Distributiion
• Slides from talk to london.pm

Allows you to type values within your program with physically meaningful units, such as Watt, or Kelvin, and have those units propagate through expressions. Fun with lvalues and tie allows type checking to be performed on assignment and the use of base and extended units allows quantities expressed in, say, feet and inches to magically convert themselves into meters if they need to.

See also Frink in Java.

Parallel::MPI::Simple

• Current version
• The test suite
• Documentation

Although Perl already has an MPI implementation (Parallel::MPI), I couldn't get it to build on any systems I had access to, and was put off fixing its problems because it did not provide a good interface to Perl. Hopefully my attempt fixes this. The module allows you to send nested data structures between nodes without having to worry about serializing them. So far the module is known to work on: Unicos, Irix, FreeBSD, Linux, Windows 2000 and Compaq Alpha Servers.

Acme::Snark

• Distribution

Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.

AI::Gene::Sequence

• Lastest Version

I found myself playing with spam matching and tried a genetic approach, this module is extracted from that effort. I later used it to play around with music generation, along with Midi::Simple.

Inside your Brain

I always wondered what it was I was thinking, and now I know:

Made using the wonderful Imager module, and some lying to Google images.