20 Years of Perl

Perl.com update
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The Email for www.perl.com Subscribers

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Welcome, readers, to the final Perl Newsletter of 2007. By
the time you
read this, your editor will happily be on his Christmas
break and will
blissfully ignore everything but video games, cookies, and
possibly that
nice superhero TV show for a couple of weeks.

It's been a wild ride in Perl this week. Stick around;
here's what
happened.

* Perl News

You've probably heard that Larry and Gloria Wall have four
children.
That's true. Sometimes Larry talks about his fifth child,
though. Between
Aron and Geneva is a daughter you probably know. She just
turned 20:

http://perlbuzz.com/2007/12/it-was-twenty-years-ag
o-today.html

That's right, the grandmother of all modern so-called
scripting languages
first met the public on December 18, 1987.

To celebrate, there was cake:

http://perlbuzz.com/2007/12/perl-birt
hday-parties-across-north-america.html

To celebrate, the Perl 5 Porters released the long-awaited
Perl 5.10:

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl5.
porters/msg/111bfa7e2b0c75ee
http://perlbuzz.com/2007/12/perl-510-now-available.html

To celebrate, the Parrot Porters released Parrot 0.5.1,
which includes a
version of the perl6 compiler which passes the sanity tests
and a port of
Perl 1 to Parrot:

ht
tp://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/18/222247

To celebrate, the Perl 1 Porters released a new version of
Perl 1, which
builds and runs on modern systems:

https
://svn.unixbeard.net/richardc/perl/perl-1/

To celebrate, Sam Vilain added yet more revisions of Perl to
the Perl git
repository:

http://utsl.gen.nz/gitweb/?p=p
erl;a=tag;h=21e4c95c6aee4eb47435c8baa0347ebab6cc2f67

To celebrate, Strawberry Perl is releasing a series of betas
of Perl
5.10.0 for Windows users:

h
ttp://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/20/1643250

To celebrate, ActiveState released ActivePerl 5.10.0:

http:
//www.activestate.com/Products/activeperl/

Sadly, your editor didn't get any cake. He did minute the
Perl 6 design
meetings:

http://u
se.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/35104
http://u
se.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/35171

Vienna.pm agreed to fund the fabulous David Landgren to
write p5p weekly
summaries again. Huzzah!

h
ttp://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/20/1614246

* Perl at O'Reilly

As you may remember from a few paragraphs ago, the Perl
community
celebrated the language's 20th anniversary this week. In
lieu of actually
releasing more software, your editor has begun to gather
memories from
Perl hackers of their experiences with the language over the
years. We
present memories from the first two decades of Perl:

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/21/20-years-of-perl.
html

Adriano Ferreira described several Perl 6 operators,
including the
Conditional Operator:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlam
p/blog/2007/12/yap6_operator_conditional_oper.html

... operator negation:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlam
p/blog/2007/12/yap6_operator_negated_operator.html

... range operators:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp
/blog/2007/12/yap6_operator_range_operators.html

... the default operator:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onl
amp/blog/2007/12/yap6_operator_the_default_oper_1.html

... and Boolean operators:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onl
amp/blog/2007/12/yet_another_perl_6_operator_bo_1.html

Your editor explained how to test software with Perl 5.10:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlam
p/blog/2007/12/test_your_software_and_perl_51.html

... and suggested that SAP sponsor some development in the
world of
dynamic languages to gather their little lost chicks under
their wings:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/bl
og/2007/12/more_composition_on_grails.html

Curtis Poe admitted that not only does he work for Auntie
Beeb, but she's
awesome:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlam
p/blog/2007/12/perl_on_rails_what_the_bbc_doe.html

Failed to start writing that copying garbage collector due
to that TV
show,

-- c
chromatic
editor Perl.com, et al

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