2018 Advent Calendars Launched for Computer Programmers and Web Geeks

An anonymous reader writes: Saturday the Perl Advent Calendar entered its 19th year by describing how the Wise Old Elf used a Calendar::List module from CPAN to update his Elven Perl Monger website with all the dates for 2019. ("It is a well known fact that all of Santa's Elves are enthusiastic Perl Developers in their free time, contributing regularly to many of the amazing Perl projects we've come to know and love...")

But meanwhile, the Perl 6 Advent Calendar was describing how Santa gets data into the North Pole's CRM by defining a grammar unit which can be parsed using a built-in method (to trim out children's signatures) -- only to be chastised by his IT elf for failing to document his solution using Perl 6's built in markup language.

And 24Ways.org is also presenting its 14th annual "advent calendar for web geeks," a nicely-formatted offering that promises "a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring you all a little Christmas cheer."

Meanwhile, the Go language site Gopher Academy launched their 6th annual advent calendar, describing how to split data with content-defined chunking.

Jose Valim, creator of the Elixir programming language, has also announced the fourth annual "Advent of Code," an event created by Eric Wastl that features an ongoing story that presents "a series of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels in any programming language you like." (The folks behind the Nim programming language are even organizing their own leaderboard at Nim-lang.org.)

And even QEMU, a free and open-source emulator performing hardware virtualization, is getting into the act with a QEMU advent calendar offering "an amazing QEMU disk image" each day through December 24th.
Feel free to leave a comment with your own reactions -- or with the URL for your own favorite online geek advent calendars...

Re:

[mermeid007]

Boy, I think this might be what developers have been waiting for all these years.

Re:

[PPH]

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307987/ [imdb.com]

Perl!

[DevNull127]

It's great to see the Perl advent calendar tradition continuing for a full 19 years. There aren't many geek traditions that go back that far.

And it's also nice to see that it's spread over the years into other programming communities.

Re:

[quenda]

Too bad this is offending to me that I'm not a Christian but a moderate Muslim. Sincerely, I hope all these projects start embracing new COCs and stop many of us from contributing at once. The future of Open Source depends on us.

Can't tell if Coward is serious or satire.

There are not a lot of Christians in the Open Source community. Larry Wall is the only notable example I am aware of.

We do of course occasionally pray to Saint IGNUcius, but like Moses and Jesus, I'm sure he is recognised as a prophet by the Shia and Sunni clerics.

WTF is it with Muslims feeling excluded by Christmas? They believe in Jesus more than I do. ( I'm not 100% sure he wasn't made up as a composite character by St. Paul.)

Re:Perl!

[helpfulcorn]

I'm a Muslim and I celebrate Christmas, as do many Muslims I know, both Sunni and Shia (most Shia I know are Lebanese and AFAIK they all have Christmas trees, or at the very least Christmas lights, some even in their offices). Yes, Muslims believe in Jesus, but especially in the western world that's not even a requirement, plenty of atheists, Jews, and so on also have Christmas trees and their children get visits from Santa. I'm pretty positive AC was just being satirical, but these days... Poe's law and all... Plus also something-something about if you don't like the code, don't run it, or some shit.

I've seen online, but never met in person, a handful anti-Christmas Muslims, not because they don't believe in Jesus, but they have an idea of "Muslims should have a culture of their own" which is a bafflingly stupid and confusing statement because Muslims are exceptionally different from Bosnia to Albania to Lebanon to Turkey to Saudi Arabia to India to Indonesia.... not to mention the vast differences between Sunni, Shia, Sufi, and every other sub-group.

Re:

[quenda]

I'm a Muslim and I celebrate Christmas, as do many Muslims I know,

Cool. I don't know any Muslims who are "anti" Christmas, though there was a class at our school that had to bad Christmas carols and decorations because of one christian family, I forget what sect.
Some Muslims I know just don't participate, even though it is a mostly secular. No decoration, no presents for the kids.

I like the way they do it in Malaysia - there everybody joins in Christmas - Muslim, Hindu or Chinese. As well as Diwali or Chinese NY often.

Re:

[Immerman]

If there's one thing everyone should be able to get behind, it's a pagan solstice party. It's based on an undeniable physical event of great significance to everyone, and draws heavily on rituals developed by a people skilled in maintaining good cheer though particularly long and dark winters. It even caught on like wildfire among Christians. In fact, if God hadn't already seen fit to have the Birth of the Son coincide with the Return of the Sun, it might have been necessary for the keepers of religious l

Re:

[helpfulcorn]

Perhaps you know this, but Birth of the *Son* and Return of the *Sun* are linguistic coincidences, and it seems to me KJV-only evangelicals and pseudo-intellectual teenagers tend to believe that Son and Sun are not only homophones in all languages, but also related in some way, especially ancient ones. You're right in the last part, poetic license was taken because the New Testament implies that Jesus was born in spring, but there was already a really hoppin' series of pagan festivals in Europe around the w

Re:

[Immerman]

I did not consider the homophone other than out of a certain humorously decorative rhyming. The poetic relationship I see is rather the parallel between the solstice marking the day on which sun light begins increase again in Winter, and the birth of Jesus marking a symbolic increase of God's light in the world.

At any rate, whatever the truth of the man was, the legend has obviously drawn extensively on many much older epic tales of other heroes. Take my comment as born part in snark about that, and part i

Re:

[Pseudonym]

I don't know any Muslims who are "anti" Christmas, though there was a class at our school that had to bad Christmas carols and decorations because of one christian family, I forget what sect.

Christianity had the best of European culture for the better part of 1000 years. Trust Americans to force the worst of it on innocent school kids.

Get the kids to sing this, I say. [youtube.com]

Re:

[TechyImmigrant]

I'm an atheist, but I have a curry on Diwali.
Nom Nom Nom

Re:

[p4nther2004]

There are not a lot of Christians in the Open Source community

I suspect that there are a lot - but most people keep their religion fairly quiet.

That said, Matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto - Ruby creator) is a Latter-Day Saint if I recall correctly.

Re:

[Pseudonym]

We do of course occasionally pray to Saint IGNUcius, [...]

What do you mean, "we"? The Patron Saint of Creative Personal Hygiene is not recognised by Vim users.

Re:

[ThickAsTwoShortPlank]

You're welcome!

I'd like to thank the awesome Perl community for helping me keep the tradition going. There was a period several years into writing the advent calendar all by myself I totally burnt out, and the Perl community came to the rescue, taking it over for a few years and turning it into a group effort. I eventually ended up taking the project back over but I mostly kept the multiple authors format (though last year for kicks I did write the entire thing.)

Ironically, nineteen years ago it was Slash

IT Crowd

[93 Escort Wagon]

Did anyone else see this story and immediately think of the IT Crowd episode “Calendar Geeks”?

Gravitational Wave Advent Calendar

[TheTiff]

My favorite geek-flavored advent calendar: https://gravity.astro.cf.ac.uk... [cf.ac.uk]

Lol

[Dj Bongz]

FreeNAS, but have Plex running on a NUC with