Method Privacy in Perl

This is a slightly expanded version of a comment I posted a couple of days ago on NEILB's blog. Neil was mostly talking about private functions, while I'll be talking mostly about private methods (i.e. object-oriented programming), but I…

Another Film-related Post

What film am I thinking of?
Two sisters who grew up in isolation from each other. One of them cute and warm-hearted. The other dresses in blue a lot, has white hair, is kinda magic, and is… shall we say… a little frosty. An unusual winter threatens the land. In trying to stop it from destroying […]

Planet Moose – May 2014

Welcome to Planet Moose, a brief write up on what’s been happening in the world of Moose in the past month, for the benefit of those of you who don’t have their eyes permanently glued to the #moose IRC channel,…

Postman Pat: The Movie

Went to see Postman Pat: The Movie today. While most of the action revolves around Postman Pat, his family, and various new characters introduced in the film, I was glad to see that all the old favourites were in there. I noted:

Mrs Goggins (but no Bonnie?!?!);
Alf, Dorothy & Bill Thompson;
Ted Glenn, who always seemed to […]

Enumerations in Moose

It’s quite a common pattern in object-oriented programming to have an attribute which takes a string as its value, but which only has a small number of valid values. For example: package Shirt; use Moose; # “S”, “M”, “L”,…

Vegetarianism on CBeebies

For some reason, perhaps a reluctance to deal with death, virtually all characters on CBeebies are portrayed as vegetarian, even some unlikely ones:

Doodles, the crocodile from Tilly and Friends eats mainly apples;
Captain Barnacles, Kwazii, Peso, and Shellington from Octonauts, despite being animals that would love a fishy snack (respectively: polar bear, cat, penguin, and sea […]

DOAPy Dist

So what’s DOPE? No, not DOPE, DOAP… what’s DOAP? Here’s what Wikipedia has to say… DOAP (Description of a Project) is an RDF Schema and XML vocabulary to describe software projects, in particular free and open source software. It…

Iguanadon and Gideon Mantell

The kids are still both really into dinosaurs thanks to CBeebies’ supply of new Andy’s Dinosaur Adventures episodes, so today we took them for a walk to Gideon Mantell’s house, which is helpfully just along the road.
Gideon Mantell is credited with discovering the first iguanadon fossils, following the discovery of a fossil tooth by his […]

A Less Smart Smartmatch

The smartmatch operator (~~) introduced in Perl 5.10 (and borrowed from Perl 6) has been the subject of much criticism. Its behaviour changes based on the types of its arguments (arrays vs hashes vs numbers vs strings vs …)….