Make noise like a camel!

In December 2007 Perl hackers worldwide received a fantastic present. Five years and half after the previous major release (5.8) we got new language features and improvements to the perl interpreter itself. More importantly, it was the starting point for shorter and regular release cycles. Thank you, p5p!

Fast forward to today. The Perl community revitalised significantly and Modern Perl has a strong momentum. Books that reflect the community best practices were published and organisations created around the efforts of the Perl community to remove the baggage and create what was lacking. Already in 2005 “modern” applications and distributions started appearing in CPAN to complement core Perl: PPI (2005), Perl::Critic (2005), Catalyst (2005), DBIx::Class (2005), Moose (2006), Strawberry Perl (2006), local::lib (2007), Padre (2008), Dancer (2009), Try::Tiny (2009), perlbrew (2010), cpanminus (2010), etc. (And my excuses for the many modern projects I forgot to include.)

There is now some noise in the perl blogsphere that suggest that a very small window is open to introduce new things to Perl core, or rather move things from CPAN to core. Maybe the window is too small to get what we need (IMHO, a complete OO framework). Or it may be already closed due to the complexity and the quantity of extra work for the already heavy charged core developers.

Nevertheless, it’s a good thing (TM) that people defining the direction of Perl 5 know what Perl developers think. People that care and work with the language. Developers that –in stark contrast with fanboys– know what the strengths and the weakness are of their preferred language.

A comment on chromatic’s and brian d foy’s questions about the upcoming Perl releases is a good start to make some noise. Writing your thoughts in your blog even better…

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