Adam Kennedy (programmer)
Adam Kennedy is an Australian Perl programmer, and one of several CPAN administrators. Under his CPAN author id of ADAMK, he is the maintainer of over 200 module distributions on CPAN which places him at the top of the CPAN contribution leaderboard [1]. Adam is notable as the first maintainer of more than 200 CPAN modules, many of which he has adopted from other authors and included in his Open Repository which is available for use by any registered CPAN author. He is a frequent presenter at open source conferences such as OSDC, OSCON, and YAPC as well as the Perl QA hackathons.
Adam has developed significant module contributions for the Perl community, particularly in the area of tools to improve the development and build toolchain such as PPI [2] (a Perl parser), CPAN::Metrics[3] (generate metrics on the 16m+ lines of code in CPAN), Portable Perl[4] (aka "Perl on a Stick") and Padre (a Perl IDE). He has also been a strong advocate of platform equality for Perl on Windows, and started both the Win32 Perl Wiki and the Strawberry Perl distribution for Windows.
PPI
The Perl PPI Parser has provided an essential building block for Perl 5 code analysis, documentation, and refactoring tools. Perl::Critic[5] uses PPI to critique Perl source code against the criteria in Perl Best Practices; the Padre IDE uses PPI for code analysis and refactoring. The PPI documentation makes reference to the truism that "Only perl (the interpreter) can parse Perl (source code)" because it is a dynamic language; a post on PerlMonks posits a formal proof [6].
Strawberry Perl
Strawberry Perl is a binary distribution of Perl for the Windows operating system. Unlike most Windows-based Perl distributions, Strawberry Perl also bundles a C compiler, make tool, and some pre-configured modules to improve compatibility with the Windows environment. The aim of this distribution is to provide a practical environment to test and use the latest modules available from CPAN. Larry Wall, creator of Perl, has endorsed this as good port for Windows[7].
Portable Perl (aka "Perl on a Stick")
Portable Perl[8] is the first Perl distribution suitable for installation to portable flash memory devices, iPods, mobile phones, cameras, etc. The first release was distributed on USB thumbdrives at OSCON 2008 [9]. Initial work for this project was funded by a grant from The Perl Foundation.
Talk Bibliography
Adam Kennedy has spoken at a number of technical conferences worldwide, including at OSCON, OSDC, Linux.conf.au, and numerous YAPC events. These talks include:
- PITA - Ridiculously Large Scale Testing, YAPC::NA 2006 [10]
- Nothing can possibly go wrong, Linux.conf.au 2007 [11]
- Strawberry Perl, Achieving Win32 Platform Equality, OSCON 2008 [12]
- Padre - The Perl IDE for normal people, OSDC 2009 [13]
References
- ^ http://thegestalt.org/simon/perl/wholecpan.html
- ^ http://search.cpan.org/dist/PPI/
- ^ http://search.cpan.org/dist/CPAN-Metrics/
- ^ http://search.cpan.org/dist/Portable/
- ^ http://search.cpan.org/dist/Perl-Critic/
- ^ http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393
- ^ http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/270267/-z_programming_languages_perl?pp=3&fp=&fpid=
- ^ http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_on_a_stick
- ^ http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/26/0623256
- ^ http://www.media-landscape.com/yapc/2006-06-26.AdamKennedy/
- ^ http://lca2007.linux.org.au/talk/122.html
- ^ http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/2769
- ^ http://2009.osdc.com.au/adam-kennedy