the most surprising, weird, strange or really "WTF" language feature

At Stackoverflow, this question: "What is, in your opinion, the most surprising, weird, strange or really "WTF" language feature you have encountered?" has a Perl related response (>270 points). The Perl special variables ($@, $", ...) does not seem to be clear for the people. I love it, and if not, use English;

(vi) stackoverflow perl report

This is the ten most rated questions at Stack Overflow last week.
Beetwen brackets: question score & answers count
Built date: 2011/12/11 08:51:18 GMT

---

1. Which situations benefit from Perl's study? - [15/2]
2. How can I start out with web development using Perl? - [10/3]
3. Hash keys encoding: Why do I get here with Devel::Peek::Dump two different results? - [10/3]
4. When should I use subroutine attributes? - [8/3]
5. What is wrong in this Perl expression? - [6/4]
6. What's the difference between various $SIG{CHLD} values? - [4/2]
7. How to determine Mysql connection ID in Perl? - [4/1]
8. How to connect mysql database and Sybase Database in one connection string in Perl? - [4/1]
9. Perl: LWP::UserAgent returns always code 200 for redirected urls - [4/1]
10. Getting encoding error when using hash keys to write xml files with XML::LibXML - [4/3]

(v) stackoverflow perl report

This is the ten most rated questions at Stack Overflow last week.
Beetwen brackets: question score & answers count
Built date: 2011/12/04 22:04:32 GMT

---

1. perl: how to get the original regex from the precompiled version? - [8/4]
2. Why does Time::HiRes::stat break list subscripting? - [7/1]
3. Is there a way to replace an if-elsif-else in Perl with something better? - [6/6]
4. best way to differentiate between untrue/unpassed args in Perl - [5/4]
5. What is the correct regular expression in PERL for email validation? - [5/1]
6. Faster searching through files in Perl - [4/3]
7. How Can I Run a Regex that Tests Text for Characters in a Particular Alphabet or Script? - [4/2]
8. PHP equivelant of Perl line? - [4/1]
9. What is the cause for the error message `SSHConnectionAborted` using Net::SSH::Expect? - [4/1]
10. Performance brake while using reflection $foo->$bar() - [4/3]

(iv) stackoverflow perl report

This is the ten most rated questions at Stack Overflow last week.
Beetwen brackets: question score & answers count
Built date: 2011/11/27 13:30:32 GMT

And I'd like to thank the reference of this work in the great Perl Weekly of last week.

---

1. What is the '@(' doing in this Perl code? - [9/4]
2. Understanding pushing to a hash and ||=[] construct. (generated in boilerplate.t) - [6/2]
3. Is there such a thing as a list in scalar context? - [6/6]
4. How to untaint system call in CGI.pm - [4/4]
5. Regexp doesn't work for specific special characters in Perl - [4/2]
6. Most efficient way to search very large text file and output lines matching any of a very large number of terms to another file - [3/2]
7. Using both ARGV and CGI in a Perl script - [3/4]
8. Perl, comparing scalar to array (with regex?) - [3/6]
9. Perl CGI gets parameters from a different request to the current URL - [3/1]
10. Capture variable assignments in a Perl eval - [3/3]

(iii) stackoverflow perl report

This is the ten most rated questions at Stack Overflow last week.
Beetwen brackets: question score & answers count
Built date: 2011/11/20 15:05:08 GMT

---

1. In Perl, how can I test whether a sequence is of the form n, n + 1, n + 2, ..., n + k? - [14/7]
2. What is @$ref->{@keys} trying to access? - [9/2]
3. align string to a pattern in perl? - [7/3]
4. How to share an object which contains a filehandle? - [7/3]
5. Why does Perl allow invoking coderefs on unblessed data structures? - [6/3]
6. How to pass optional parameters to a Perl function? - [5/3]
7. Perl: Hash ref accessing array of keys - [5/1]
8. Is there a way to check for admin rights in Windows with Perl? - [5/1]
9. How do I convert a full path to a relative path using perl? - [5/2]
10. creating csv file with perl - [5/1]

II stackoverflow perl report

This is the ten most rated questions at Stack Overflow last week.
Beetwen brackets: question score & answers count
Built date: 2011/11/13 13:57:31 GMT

---

1. Is it possible to implement lisp "language" in Perl 6? - [5/2]
2. How do I turn an array returned from a function (like split) into an array reference? - [4/3]
3. set exit status if perl -cw emits warning - [4/3]
4. Difference in blowfish encryption between perl and ruby - [4/1]
5. Perl module loading - Safeguarding against: perhaps you forgot to load "Bla"? - [3/1]
6. How to get aspect ratio from video file? - [3/2]
7. Is there a perl 5.005 core module that would convert epoch seconds to a datetime string? - [3/3]
8. Catalyst Controller Questions - [3/1]
9. How can I tell which of the alternatives matched in a Perl regular expression pattern? - [3/4]
10. How to limit a request to POST in Catalyst - [3/1]

Stack Overflow - perl questions report

I usually read and answer questions at Stack Overflow. With this post, I start a weekly report of the more relevant perl related questions. Hope it will be interesting for you.

This is the top ten most rated questions at Stack Overflow last week.
Beetwen brackets: question score & answers count
Built date: 2011/11/06 16:02:30 GMT

---

1. Simple search and replace without regex - [6/5]
   (2011/11/01 18:00:19 GMT)
2. How and where can I learn more about the Perl optimizer? - [6/2]
   (2011/11/01 20:13:38 GMT)
3. Are Perl regexes turing complete? - [6/2]
   (2011/11/02 15:40:12 GMT)
4. How to plan additional tests run by external sub? - [5/2]
   (2011/11/02 11:52:13 GMT)
5. Why does print ($a = a..c) produce: 1E0 - [5/3]
   (2011/11/03 23:53:16 GMT)
6. Replace entire paragraph with another from linux command line - [4/5]
   (2011/10/31 04:32:18 GMT)
7. Perl shallow syntax check? ie. do not check syntax of imports - [4/4]
   (2011/10/31 14:26:49 GMT)
8. Infinite loop in perl Carp module - [4/2]
   (2011/11/01 01:00:37 GMT)
9. Installing perl module: cpan shell vs rpm/deb - [4/2]
   (2011/11/01 10:10:00 GMT)
10. Reading password protected XLSX on linux (and windows) with Perl - [4/2]
    (2011/11/01 13:31:32 GMT)

Most RxR modules - top 30

The project http://cpanratings.perl.org allows us to rate the perl CPAN modules, and it provides interesting information in terms of starts and comments. You can analyze the stats csv file in order to elaborate new stats. The question I'm trying to answer is this: what's the most rated module? ...

Each line of the CSV file give us the name of the module, the rating (a number between 1 and 5) and the reviews counter. I thought about the list order, which field should I use? After a while, I decided to calculate a new value:

RxR = Rating x Reviews

A simple perl script display the list I was asking for (top 30):


 #                    Module Name Rating Reviews     RxR
== ============================== ====== =======  ======
 1                            DBI    4.7     31    145.7
 2         Spreadsheet-WriteExcel    4.8     26    124.8
 3               Template-Toolkit    4.6     21     96.6
 4               Catalyst-Runtime    4.8     20       96
 5                  Devel-NYTProf    4.9     18     88.2
 6                CGI-Application    4.8     18     86.4
 7                  HTML-Template    4.1     21     86.1
 8                  WWW-Mechanize    4.6     18     82.8
 9                         Dancer    3.5     23     80.5
10                     XML-Simple    4.4     17     74.8
11                     DBD-SQLite    4.6     16     73.6
12                    Devel-Cover    4.9     15     73.5
13                          Moose    4.9     15     73.5
14                      Class-DBI    4.4     16     70.4
15                  App-cpanminus    5.0     13       65
16                       DateTime    4.6     14     64.4
17                   Module-Build    3.2     20       64
18                            ack    4.9     13     63.7
19                     HTML-Mason    4.9     13     63.7
20                            POE    4.9     13     63.7
21                 File-Find-Rule    4.5     14       63
22                    libwww-perl    4.5     14       63
23                     DBD-Oracle    3.7     16     59.2
24                         CGI.pm    4.5     13     58.5
25                     XML-LibXML    4.5     13     58.5
26                         Imager    4.8     12     57.6
27                      MIME-Lite    4.8     12     57.6
28                        XML-RSS    4.1     14     57.4
29                 SQL-Translator    3.9     14     54.6
30                     DBIx-Class    4.9     11     53.9


I named it: The top RxR module list.
Do you know how many modules are rated? 2707 (11% of the whole), and 1700 has only one review.

Perl related blog traffic

I have written only a few posts of perl related topics (about 30). With the new blogger interface, it's easy to check the google analytics and obtain a lot of valuable information. It's interesting the wold map with green colors (dark signals more traffic). These are the country stats of my blog:

My top ten visitors are from:

1. United States
2. Spain
3. Germany
4. United Kingdom
5. Russia
6. Argentina
7. Canada
8. Netherlands
9. Brasil
10. Australia

I think the blog language it's the first reason that justifies the territory colors. The second place is justified because of my good friends in Spain. But it's interesting to observe that there isn't any traffic from Africa, and others countries like India...

Of course, another reason it's the quality of the contents I wrote, but I imagine that the light colors of the map won't vary too much...

Do you have similar stats you like to share?

Perl Weekly gratitude

I am sure you already know the Perl Weekly newsletter, a great work of Gabor Szabo. If not, please take a look at this url: http://perlweekly.com/.

It's not only an integration work about the news, modules, articles, etc. It also includes excellents comments, which are a great summary of the topics they introduce. I recommend you the suscription.

Every Monday since the project was born, I read the newsletter, and find interesting news and articles. And this morning I saw a link to my article in the "Not Perl" section, Bootstrap && Perl. It was a pleasure  and a surprise. So, thank you Gabor.

My favorite resources to get information about Perl are the following:

1. http://search.cpan.org/recent
2. http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org/
3. http://perlweekly.com/
4. http://blogs.perl.org/
5. http://jobs.perl.org

Have you got anyone not listed? please, write down!

Of course, a lot of blogs indexed by enlightnedperl (I don't want to forget anyone, so I don't enumerate them).