Anonymous asks:

I've seen "map" used in Perl code and I do not understand it at all. Can you explain it?

Perl's map function is often under-appreciated and not understood by Perl newbies. That's probably because it works on arrays, transforming one array into another array or hash. It's a time saver, both in typing time and when the code runs. Map does nothing you cannot do with a loop and if you are new to Perl a loop is likely exactly what you do use.

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Amazon now allows anyone to buy Echo and has also announced a SDK that allows anyone to write application functions. That really fired me up, at least momentarily: I can think of many things I'd like to do with Alexa myself and at least some of those might be of interest to others. You can write in Json or Java, neither of which I have great experience with, but I do have a little and I was able to read and at least mostly understand the provided sample code.