It Was About Time To Find A Shared Vision Of Perl

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2021-07-26 18:30:06

The Perl Foundation (TPF) is looking pretty active lately, undertaking a number of initiatives which aim to advance Perl's ecosystem further.

The start came with "Coding in Perl? What support do you need?", a survey into what help and guidance Perl beginners would find useful, which we reported in "New To Perl? What Do You Need? The Results". Among other findings, it was revealed that beginners would like a standardized way of doing things along the lines of a framework, they crave the security and agility that an IDE provides, and that, when they look for help, their preference is first books and then online courses and videos, relegating real-time chat and one-to-one contact at the final places.

The problem that TPF is looking at is that Perl's ecosystem is compartmentalized; one part doesn't know what the other part is doing and there's no clear communication path between them. So the attempt now is to get a high-level overview of what is important for each compartment and connect the pieces in order for the TPF to be able to offer the best possible help and collectively push Perl further ahead.

One key group is the Perl Steering Council, which supports the maintenance of the Perl core. Its members views on Perl are that regular expressions play an important part and they lose sleep over the debate of new features versus backward compatibility.

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