FPGA Board Integration - using Perl - Rehovot Perl Mongers

Last night we had the monthly Perl Mongers meeting in Rehovot. This time the number of people was lower - we were 7 on the meeting. In the first part Lary Ecker gave a presentation on the tool he developed a couple of years ago. In short he avoided a 70,000 USD purchase by investing partial development time of two people for two months. This tool also allows the engineers in his company to do the integration work in a matter of hours with an automated tool instead of two weeks of manual integration work which is very error prone.

You can read a bit more about this on the announcement page of the Rehovot Perl Mongers and you can also contact Lary via the mailing list of the Israeli Perl Mongers or via his LinkedIn account.

During the break while consuming some of the refreshment we talked about sorting and the sorting function in Perl even mentioning the Schwartzian Transformation.

Hadar asked if it possible - or logical - to have two different transformation function in a sort function. If not then why do we need to write it twice. E.g. why do we need two write length twice in the following statement?

  @sorted_by_length = sort { length $a <=> length $b } @words

I think the point is that having some kind of statement like this:

   sort { length, '<=>' } @words

would be too make the single condition too specialized. We still could not express statement like this in a more simple way:

  @sorted_by_length_and_by_ascii = sort {
  	   length $a <=> length $b 
                      or
                    $a cmp $b 
   } @words

BTW Hadar promised to look into Padre and PDL development a bit but then after her Matlab and PDL talks on the previous two meetings she already got a freelance work so she did not have the time. Pointing this out just so you can it pays of to give talks on Perl Monger meetings...

During the sorting discussion Amit Aronovitch, our resident representative of Python and Matlab asked if Perl does not have a function to return the indexes of the elements as Python has. Apparently I misunderstood it as I have not found any such function in Python. Matlab has that feature and PDL too:

  perldl> $x = pdl(6, 4, 8);
  perldl> p $x
  [6 4 8]
  perldl> p $x->qsort
  [4 6 8]
  perldl> p $x->qsorti
  [1 0 2]

Though this will work on numbers only.

In pure perl I'd just sort the indexes:

  @words = qw(b a c);
  @sorted = sort { $words[$a] cmp $words[$b] } 0..@words-1
  print "@sorted";
  
  # 1 0 2

After the break I offered 3 talks.

A 15 minute talk on how to create an open source project based on my experience with Padre that I am going to give on FOSDEM.

A talk about packaging and installing CPAN modules by downstream distributors (e.g. Linux distributions). This is in preparation to the 45 minute talk I am going to present on FOSDEM.

The last suggestion was talking about Web development and the development of CPAN::Forum.

I am going to describe my talk in a bit more detail in the next post but for now I think this is enough.

See you next month on the meeting of the Rehovot Perl Mongers