I use temporary files pretty often. There are a bunch of ways to do this, and File::Temp is probably the most popular. It’s pretty good, but also pretty complicated. A big part of this complication is that it’s meant to keep your filename around until you’re done with it, and to let you pick its name and location. Often, though, I don’t need these features. I just need a place to stream a whole bunch of data that I’ll seek around in later, or maybe just stream back out. In other words, instead of holding a whole lot of data in memory, put it in a file.

I’ve been doing more puttering about with perl6 lately. One of my chief complaints has been that the repl is pretty lousy, keyboard-wise. There’s no history, so I do a lot of copy and paste, and there’s no way to move left non-destructively. If you notice a typo at the beginning of your line, you’re stuffed.

Recently I wrote about my dumb CPAN metafile analyzer, and how I’d tried to keep it fast. One of the things I tried to speed it up was creating a ramdisk for all of the archive extraction. The speed boost in this case turned out to be low, but it isn’t always. (Also, I inexplicably used a journaling filesystem .) When you’re doing a ton of file operations, the difference between physical storage and in-memory can be huge.

Just about exactly five years ago, I wrote a goofy little program that walked through all of the CPAN and produced a CSV file telling me what was used to produce most dists. That is: it looked at the generated_by field in the META files and categorized them. Here’s what the first report, from April 11, 2010, looked like:

I spent last week in Berlin, at the 2015 Perl QA Hackathon. This is an annual event where a group of various programmers involved with the “CPAN toolchain” and closely related projects get together, hash out future plans, write code that is hard to get written in “free time,” and communicate in person the hard that is stuff to communicate over IRC and email.

At the Perl conference, YAPC::NA, there will be a ninety minute question and answer session with Larry Wall.

Once in a while, my daughter asks me to teach her programming. We’ve done a number of little things together, including some Python, some Scratch, and other things. When I was trying to think of what I enjoyed doing with computers around that age, one of the things I remembered was drawing. We did turtle graphics with Logo in my school, and it was nice to get instant and visual feedback of what the program did. I thought this seemed like a fun idea.

Saturday, 4th day of the Frost Moon, 937

[ update: I added a bit of an update at the end, in which I find that my fundamental worries were wrong, because the system is less convenient than I hoped! So it goes. ☹ I decided to post this anyway, because the thoughts were worth thinking, so maybe somebody else will find them interesting to see. Or not. Who even reads this thing? ]

Friday, 3rd day of the Frost Moon, 937