ryarger writes "Woo Hoo! After a seeming eternity of wait, there is finally an implementation of stored procedures for MySQL. It uses Perl as the stored proc language, too!" Also note that this piece of work was done by OSDNs own Krow. Very cool work I must say.

Dmitry Dvoinikov writes: "I'm very excited about the web scripting language I had to learn and use with the company I currently work for. It's absolutely unknown to public, used in may be dozen of places around the world. But it's so great, I thought it deserves more publicity. So, here is the introductory article about the BOA web scripting engine. And here is its homepage if you are interested." If you know any PHP or perl, the small "hello webreaders" comparison is interesting (and Yes, favors Boa;) ).

Last week you asked Bradley Kuhn, VP of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) questions about working with RMS, his views on software freedom, and much more. He's answered at length below, on everything from becoming a saint to the "web app loophole," perl, and the next iteration of the GPL.

Saint Aardvark the Carpeted writes "Check this out for sheer genius...This guy has posted to Perl Monks a script that uses the Perl Eliza module to respond to spam. Check it and contribute your suggestions for improved vocabulary." The downside of course is that spammers never set their reply correctly (which I think is forgery, and should be treated as such) so this is probably more academic then useful, but its definitely funny.

ShoeHorn writes: "Here is a good article (1st of a 4 part series), that introduces you to the Ruby language. If you are currently a programmer coming from the likes of C++, Perl, or Python, you will see some strong similarities (especially to Python)."

O'Reilly has put up an interesting interview with Randal Schwartz and Tom Phoenix, the guys behind the llama book (Learning Perl). In addition to all the perl stuff, Randal gives his take on Smalltalk, Ruby, and Python. And (not surprisingly) they plug the newest edition of the book.

Björn Schotte writes: "All sessions including abstracts were published today on php-conference.de. Also, online registration is now possible on the signup page. There are more than 60 sessions plus power workshops on the pre-conference day, plus an extra so-called Open Source room where Open Source PHP projects can present themselves for free. Also, a Q&A panel with nearly all members of the PHP Core Group will be organized where you can ask them about things like "What about the future of PHP?" / "Will there be an engine for PHP/Perl/Python together?" etc."

saihung writes: "I pitched a Linux-based file and print queue server to a department at a local university, and they accepted with one caveat: that I also implement print quotas and accounting. The accounting isn't really a big deal, but I've looked high and low and found nothing even approaching comprehensive quota support. Does anyone know of a print quota system for *nix that doesn't amount to "here's a few perl scripts that don't work"?" There are several printing systems under development, but I don't have any idea which would be the easiest to implement a print quota system. Anyone?

Tim O'Reilly writes "Brian Jepson, a long-time perl hacker who's been working with Microsoft on some of O'Reilly's books about .Net, and with Miguel on mono, rebuts Petreley's warnings about mono."

So, we've gotten a lot of submissions about various things related to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Michael Tiemann had a few words before the convention; Dan Gillmor wrote a column about it; Fred Baker made a few flameworthy remarks. For whatever reason the whole conference seemed to be dominated by the Mundie-Tiemann debate. See our earlier story for some good links, or watch the debate video, or just read some post-debate coverage here or here. And if you haven't heard enough from Mundie, you can even read his post-debate letter.

David Mentré writes: "The ICFP 2001 programming contest TASK is now available. The objective is to write an optimizer (aka compressor) for an HTML-like language. It must work for arbitrarily big inputs and in a limited wall-clock time. Can you guess what will be the winning language? ;)" We already announced the contest, but now that the task is available, it might be fun to look at. So what will the contestants come up with? Anyone think perl might be the language of choice? :)

Anonymous Coward writes "I'm sure I'm not the first to report this, but Perl.com put up a synopsis of Larry Wall's annual report on the state of Perl. "

Craig Maloney contributed this review of the Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0, which he calls "the most portable way to get five Perl books from here to there." Like others in the same series, this package from O'Reilly assembles several related titles onto a single, searchable disk to save endless page-thumbing, but not without a few glitches.

flounder_p queries: "I have recently started playing with the Ruby programming language and think it's really great. I was just wondering why you guys think Ruby has not caught on more in the open source community than it has? How many of you guys are using it? Will it ever catch on or will it always be looked at as yet another scripting language? Don't get me wrong scripting languages are great (and I live by Perl) but I still hope to see Ruby catch on more. I would like to hear opinions on things on why Ruby is good or bad not on why OOP is good or bad. We have already had that discussion here." On a side note, a little birdy tells me that BlackAdder has plans for Ruby support in its next beta.

pudge (Slashcode wrangler, MacPerl maintainer, and use.perl editor) wrote in to tell us that The Perl Journal has been bought by CMP. This of course ends the ongoing struggles with Earthweb that has resulted in many subscribers (including me) going without what is one of the best technical journals being published today. CMP of course publishes several other good journals including Dr. Dobbs. Besides Jon Orwant (who will continue as Senior Contributing Editor) nobody is happier to see TPJ return then me!

These are Robert's answers to questions about GnuCash you posted on June 18th. He says, "Some of the answers to the questions here were the result of discussions with the other people at LDG, where others were more qualified to speak on various topics, so the readers are really getting the benefit of our collected wisdom (well, we hope it's wisdom :) )"

kato writes: "Doug Bagley has posted results from benchmarking of 29 different language implementations solving 25 different problems (he's written ~600 of the 725 programs so far). The languages include C/C++, Perl, Python, Eiffel, BASH, Tcl, and OCaml. The problems range in complexity from "Hello, World!" to the Sieve of Eratosthenes and Matrix Multiplication. The results can be sorted by speed, memory usage, or lines of code. You can also give one particular program more weight than another (if you are doing more client/server code than "Hello, World!") and find the faster/smallest/shortest language implementation. I can see many of my programs being written in OCaml from now on." Update: 07/04 12:42 PM by CT : The site is apparently now redirecting people back here. I guess technically thats an error message, just not a helpful one. Update: 07/05 8:40 PM by M : Please don't email. The link is broken. We know. The guy is running a server at home on a metered connection, and doesn't want any more traffic.

Exomorph writes: " C Styled Scripting (CSS) has just been released for Linux! (Already available for Windows, and OS/2) You can use CSS like an interpreter (Like Perl) or as a scripting engine within your own applications. It follows the C syntax very closely and has now been released under the GNU General Public License." Is anyone using this?

Microsoft's new crusade against licenses that enforce source-code sharing has reached the EULA of their Mobile Internet Toolkit. It even disallows the use of any "Publicly Available Software" tool in the production of software using this SDK. This seems to be a very wide ranging restriction applying to compilers (gcc), editors (vim, staroffice), filesystems (backup on linux server), web-browsers (mozilla logging into some online tool provider), Java (sun's virtual machine). The licenses covered include: the GPL and LGPL, the Artistic License (e.g., PERL), the Mozilla Public License, the Netscape Public License, the Sun Community Source License (SCSL), and the Sun Industry Standards License (SISL). Is this legal? Thanks to Jonathan for the link. Update: 06/26 05:42 PM by S : Here's a legal opinion on the matter.

Okay, here's a nice "behind the curtains" peek into the way tech industry analysts (who are not the same as stock analysts) get and interpret their data, courtesy of IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky, in the form of answers to the insightful questions you asked him last week.