The Perl documentation translation project (POD2) Launched.
From: Jesse Vincent: It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.0. Perl 5.11.0 is a DEVELOPMENT release. We're making it available to you today to make it easy for you to test your software on what will eventually become Perl 5.12.
The slides for Tim Bunce's updated Perl Myths talk are currently one of the featured presentations on the front page of SlideShare.
The London Perl Workshop is a free one-day conference in central London, UK. It will be held on Saturday the 5th December 2009 at Westminster University's New Cavendish Campus.
Cross posted from brian d foy at use Perl; O'Reilly dropped the regular price of e-books for Learning Perl and Mastering Perl to $9.99. I volunteered to be the guinea pig for pricing experiments. I specifically want to see if this makes it easier to get these books when access to the hard-copies is prohibitively expensive. You can get these books in Mobi, PDF, or ePub directly from O'Reilly. I'd like to do more of these sorts of experiments to get the books into as many hands as possible.
A large number of Perl's CPAN Testers websites have been updated today to use a common look-and-feel. The full list of updated sites is as follows: CPAN Testers Dynamic Reports, CPAN Testers Static Reports, CPAN Testers Wiki, CPAN Testers Statistics, CPAN Testers Pass Matrix, CPAN Testers Preferences, CPAN Testers Development and CPAN Testers Blog.
Lukas Biewald of Dolores Labs downloaded the last 150 Twitter messages referring to different popular programming languages, then crowdsourced people through Amazon Mechanical Turk to judge each message as being positive or negative towards that language. He found that Perl, with over 60% of its messages being positive, had a higher percentage of positive feedback than any other language in the study. This compares to about 55% positive feedback for Ruby and 45% positive feedback for Python.
Catalyzed.org published an interview with Tom Doran about the release of Catalyst 5.8, where he talks briefly about what makes this release a particularly exciting milestone for the Catalyst project.
A question posted recently on Perlmonks by generator asks What was the bait (project, problem or opportunity) that hooked you on Perl?, leading to a long list of fantastic war stories. In response, BrowserUK came up with a perfectly succinct summary of Perl's benefits: "At last! A language that preferred practicality over purity; solutions over dogma".