If you have a Perl-related news item you'd like to share, you may post it in the Perl Newssection.
Please try to avoid duplicating news; but pointers (with summaries) to important stories on other sites are acceptable here.
In April this year Google shut down the Civic Information Representatives API on which my Contact My Reps services depended. The website at https://contactmyreps.com has had an announcement that the service is no longer working, since then.
But yesterday I published WebService::OpenStates, a Perl client for the Plural Open States API that provides some of the same information Google did, and Contact My Reps is back up and running again!
The results (which are for US addresses) lack the president and vice-president, and local officials, but provide all the federal and state-level legislators for the address's state. Also, Open States works from lat/long coordinates, so I am looking those up from an address with WebService::Geocodio. This makes the whole thing somewhat more brittle. But anyway I am pleased to be back on line and providing contact information for representatives, because silence betokens consent :-)
The way forward always starts with a minimal test.
David Mitchell completely rewrote the perlxs reference manual for the XS language
for extending Perl in C. The rewritten version was just released in the development
release 5.43.6 and will be included in the next stable release of Perl.
I used pod2pdf to generate a PDF version
of the document* once I'd built 5.43.6 (using perlbrew btw) and it's 77
pages in US-Letter size format. I didn't check for the length of the
previous version of perlxs.pod but 77 pages is a small book; this is
not a minor achievement but rather a significant contribution of the sort that does
not always get the recognition and accolades it deserves.
* I put it in
my Google Drive, hopefully I've got the settings right so that you should be
able to download it from there.sorry, Google Drive doesn't work that way.
Or just run pod2pdf on the pod yourself,
of course–it's not a difficult tool to use).
Edit Again
Should have listened to my first vague recollection of how Google Drive works. Yes, it can
serve as a file-sharing system if the right settings are enabled. Now they are—now anyone
with the URL should be able to view / download the PDF file in the link above.
Dec 23, 2025 at 16:10 UTC
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows (and gals) with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes, and eternally young Donald Fagen —> I.G.Y. (Slightly modified for inclusiveness)
Dotcom Survivor Syndrome is real. So is Version Number Paralysis. Together, they’ve unfairly buried a language that remains fast, expressive, and battle-tested.
We can’t change the past. But we can:
Acknowledge the emotional and historical baggage
Celebrate the role Perl played in inventing the modern web
Educate developers about what Perl really is today
Push back against the assumption that old == obsolete
Certain vendors have certainly played the appeal to novelty fallacy to its outer limits to sell their own gimmicks while simultaneously maligning Perl. That'll take a lot to overcome, but is doable.
Yes, it's December again which means that it is time for the Perl Advent Calendar.
It is not too late to contribute to the calendar as they do not yet have 24 articles ready to go and are soliciting entries via the github repo. If there is a favourite module you think the world should know about or some insight you have gained from a particular project now would be a good time to write it up and submit it.
Trickster is a modern, lightweight Perl web framework designed to offer a clean developer experience without the heaviness of larger frameworks. Unlike Mojolicious, which is full-stack, and Dancer, which aims for minimalism, Trickster focuses on practical essentials with secure, production-ready defaults.
What makes Trickster different:
• Modern architecture: Stateless, signed-cookie sessions and a clean PSGI-native core make it easy to scale and deploy.
• Security-first design: Built-in validation, secure cookies, and CORS support are enabled out of the box.
• Developer-friendly CLI: Includes project scaffolding, generators, and a hot-reload development server—features often found in frameworks like Rails or Express.
• Balanced approach: Trickster offers more structure and tooling than Dancer while remaining lighter and more PSGI-focused than Mojolicious.
The framework is still young, and I would greatly appreciate feedback from the Perl community. I’m actively looking for reviews, suggestions, and real-world impressions to help shape its next steps.
So, since I wanted to get away from the node-ecosystem, and my static site generator was written in JS, I thought I would try my hand at writing one in Perl. This is the most fun I've had writing code for years. It's just so nice to write.
I have to agree. While there can be utility in knowing other scripting languages, it is Perl which stands out as being a lot of fun. YMMV.
Over on the GnuPG mailing list, Robert J. Hansen mentioned Perl in his "Cryptography 101" message in the context of reasons to learn group theory:
Group theory is to mathematics what Perl scripting is to system
administration: it doesn't get much respect but knowing it is an
essential, non-negotiable skill purely because of how much it glues the
whole system together.
I'd add that Perl is quite an amplifier of abilities, especially when dealing with text files including config files, JSON, and XML. This is good recognition of its utility.
As of June 2025, Groklaw is back! This site was a really valuable resource in the now ancient fight between SCO and Linux. As it turned out, SCO was all hat and no cattle.Thanks to PJ for all her work, we owe her so much. RIP -- 2003 to 2013.
DuckDuckGo has made a second $25,000 USD donation to The Perl and Raku Foundation. This is tremendous news, and will help to continue to fund development of Perl. From TPRF President Stuart J Mackintosh:
DuckDuckGo has demonstrated how Perl and its ecosystem can deliver power and scale to drive the DuckDuckGo core systems, plug-in framework and Instant Answers. The Foundation is grateful that DuckDuckGo recognises the importance of Perl, and for their generous funding support for a second year through their charitable donations programme.
As of June 2025, Groklaw is back! This site was a really valuable resource in the now ancient fight between SCO and Linux. As it turned out, SCO was all hat and no cattle.Thanks to PJ for all her work, we owe her so much. RIP -- 2003 to 2013.
SUSE has recently made a big donation to the Core Maintenance Fund for Perl 5:
The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF) is thrilled to announce a substantial $11,500 donation from SUSE, one of the world’s leading enterprise Linux and cloud-native and AI solutions providers. This generous contribution bolsters the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund and demonstrates SUSE’s commitment to the open-source ecosystem.
As of June 2025, Groklaw is back! This site was a really valuable resource in the now ancient fight between SCO and Linux. As it turned out, SCO was all hat and no cattle.Thanks to PJ for all her work, we owe her so much. RIP -- 2003 to 2013.
