Reduce in Perl

Perl has grep/map/sort since probably forever (actually, sort() starts appearing since Perl 2.0). But even now, reduce is still not a builtin in Perl 5 (though available via List::Util), so doing reduce is probably not something that comes as naturally to Perl programmers. Meanwhile Ruby, JavaScript, and even PHP have their reduce operation builtin.

But then, reduce is "not really that useful" (you can just replace it with a simple for loop). So much that Python 3.0 now removes the function from the global namespace and reduces it (pun intended) to a mere member of functools. I guess reduce is really handy only if you are in a heavily functional language that lacks procedural basics.

This can be thought of as a testament to the level of language design skill that Larry has.

The rather funny thing is, in Perl 6, in addition to the reduce() List method there is also the reduce ([]) metaoperator as well.

Perl vs JavaScript

Here are some notes I made while hacking on Language::Expr::Compiler::JS. Of course, there are a million differences between the two, but these focus mostly on operators and types. Hope it can be useful.

• Double vs single quotes. There are practically no functional differences between double-quoted string and single-quoted one in JavaScript. In Perl, single quotes do not interpret escape sequences other than \\ and \', but in JavaScript both single- and double-quoted strings interpret the same set of escape sequences.
  
  
• String escape sequences. Perl does not support JavaScript's \v (vertical tab), while JavaScript does not support \N{NAME} (named Unicode character), \e and \c[ (escape/control), \a (alarm bell).
  
  
• Two undefs. JavaScript has two special nothingness/undefinedness: null and undefined. Strangely, null == undefined and they are equal to themselves, but they are not equal to any other values (including 0, '', false). The difference between the two is just this: undefined is not a keyword but a global variable (you can assign to it, but of course you shouldn't). If you want less confusion, just use null.
  
  
• Behaviour of "+". Since JavaScript only has "+" (while Perl has "+" and "."), you should be aware that "+" in JavaScript coerces to strings when one of the operands is a string (e.g. 1 + "2" becomes "12"). In Perl, "+" coerces to numbers. So be careful when mixing numbers and strings.
  
  
• You need to explicitly "return" value from a function. But there's a cute shortcut for one statement functions introduced in JavaScript 1.8: 'function (x) x*3' which is equivalent to 'function (x) { return x*3 }' so in this case you don't need the "return".
  
  
• Boolean. JavaScript has real boolean. In Perl you can use 'boolean' from CPAN which gives you practically the same stuff.
  
  
• JavaScript lacks a lot of Perl convenience operators, including <=> cmp, low-precedenced and/or/not, //, =~, ~~, qq(), qx(), qw(), m//, s///, **, etc.
  
  

All in all, I think JavaScript is quite nice and simple language with familiar syntax (at least compared to PHP). It also has lexical variables, anonymous functions, OO, etc.

JSYNC is brilliant!

It's a brilliant idea: bank on JSON's popularity and more widespread implementations, add some of the important YAML features not present in JSON on top of it. The result is JSYNC, along with its preliminary CPAN module. (I'd probably picked a different name and choose something like "\" for prefix instead of ".", but hey, it's not my project :-)

A few months ago I was really desperate with the YAML situation in Perl. We have the largest number of YAML implementations, but none of them are good enough compared to Ruby's libsyck. I even contemplated converting all my YAML documents to JSON, but of course that plan was cancelled because JSON doesn't even support references nor objects.

Here's to hoping JSYNC will rocket to popularity soon enough. Ingy++.

Custom dumping *in* Data::Dump

After blogging about my small patch to Data::Dump, I contacted Gisle Aas. He is quite responsive and finally comes up with a new release (1.16) of Data::Dump containing the cool new filter feature. My previous example after converted to use the new feature becomes:

$ perl -MData::Dump=dumpf -MDateTime -e'dumpf(DateTime->now, sub { my ($ctx, $oref) = @_; return unless $ctx->class eq "DateTime"; {dump=>qq([$oref])} })'
[2010-06-09T12:22:58]

This filter mechanism is quite generic and allows you to do some other tricks like switching classes, adding comments, and ignore/hide hash keys. The interface is also pleasant to work with, although starting with this release the "no OO interface" motto should perhaps be changed to "just a little bit of OO interface" :-)

Aren't we glad that stable and established modules like this are still actively maintained and getting new features.

Thanks, Gisle!

Menunggu statistik-statistik menarik dari sensus 2010

Koran PR beberapa minggu lalu menulis, Sensus Penduduk 2010 selain bertujuan mencacah jiwa, juga ingin "mencari fakta-fakta unik." Salah satu (dan satu-satunya) contoh: mencari orang tertua. Dan benar memang, selama beberapa minggu ini sudah ada beberapa artikel yang meliput tentang nenek di kampung anu yang berumur 115th, lalu rekornya dipecahkan oleh yang berumur 120th, lalu 125th, dst. Terakhir kalau tidak salah ada yang lebih dari 140th (walaupun semua klaim usia ini berdasarkan ucapan semata, bahkan tidak ada akte lahir atau bukti tertulis lainnya).

Tentu saja, selain hanya mencari orang tertua, masih ada banyak sekali hal menarik yang bisa diekstrak dari data sensus ini. Misalnya, saya harapkan, BPS dapat menerbitkan adalah daftar nama depan dan nama belakang yang paling lazim, seperti yang dilakukan oleh badan sensus Amrik.

Saat menyusun versi awal modul Perl Locale::ID::GuessGender::FromFirstName, saya kesulitan mencari basis data nama yang bisa dipakai, karenanya saya mengambil 1000 nama depan terlazim dari database pelanggan kantor. Tentu saja, andaikan ada data yang lebih representatif, seperti dari sensus penduduk, tentu jauh lebih baik.

Seandainya diberi kesempatan, saya bersedia mengolah data mentahnya ;-)