parrot

Concurrency and Erlang, and more

/ TimBunce

Just found the excellent Concurrency and Erlang page by André Pang. (I’m not sure how I got there, but I started froma post by Pedro Melo.)

The page has great links to quality articles and resources with commentary and context for each. It also includes sections specific to C, Objective-C, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript, and Haskell.

What, no Perl? Well, using threads in Perl 5 is rather painful. I’ve never had to use threads with Perl 5 (beyond making DBI thread safe a few years ago) and I’d be happy to never have to.

On the other hand, I believe people are using threads successfully, though I’ve no handy links for you beyond pointing out that CPAN offers a number of solid Thread:: modules.

All this reminded me that I’d never got around to reading Parrot’s Concurrency design document. So I did. I liked it as a statement of direction, though it’s a little thin on the interaction between schedulers.

I couldn’t find many interesting links discussing both Parrot and Erlang. An O’Reilly Radar post called Parrot and Multi-threading from September 2007 was hopeful.

I’m still wondering if Parrot could act as a virtual machine for Erlang. I think that would be a valuable test case for the quality and scalability of the concurrency design.

Perl Myths

/ TimBunce / 30 Comments

Update: several more recent versions of my Perl Myths talk are available. These have significant updates. Slides can be found on slideshare.net and screencasts can be found on my blip.tv channel.

I’ve uploaded my Perl Myths presentation to slideshare.net and google video:

“Perl has it’s share of myths. This presentation debunks a few popular ones with hard facts. Surprise yourself with the realities.”

While I agree with Andy Lester that Good Perl code is the best form of evangelism, I wanted to put together a presentation that others could refer to when they encounter misinformation about Perl. I cover these myths that I’ve heard recently:

  • Perl is dead
  • Perl is hard to read / test / maintain
  • Perl 6 is killing Perl 5

and pull in a wealth of upto date information, some of it quite surprising even to those familiar with Perl and its community. There are two versions, plus a video. I recommend the one with notes (which have useful extra detail and context for the slides) which is best viewed as a PDF. There’s also one without notes which I’ve embedded here:

I videoed an extended version of this presentation at IWTC in Dublin in February. The first 40 minutes or so correspond with the slides above. In the remaining 30 minutes or so I talk about Parrot and Perl 6. I’ve embedded the video below, but wordpress forces me to use a small size so you’ll probably prefer to view it at video.google.com: