What New(ish) Perl features Do You Use?

Over on LinkedIn, someone asked me “What core PERL[sic] features do you use regularly that are new since 95?” It’s hard to be sure as the perldelta files only seem to go back to 1997 (for example, when were qw(…), q(…) and qq(…) added?), but here’s a quick list off the top of my head. […]

Texinfo 5.0 in Perl

There was a story on Slashdot on Sunday saying that the new version of Texinfo had replaced the old, C, implementation of makeinfo with one written in Perl. I thought it would be interesting to look at the Perl they’ve written. This is, after all, a reasonably large example of Perl code that will be […]

Give Me MetaCPAN

Ever since MetaCPAN launched I’ve been getting increasingly irritated with people who still use links to search.cpan.org. Isn’t it obvious that MetaCPAN is better? Why do people still insist on sharing links to the older site? Of course they do it for various reasons. Perhaps they aren’t as in touch with the modern Perl world […]

Why Corporates Hate Perl

This is a reprint of an old blog post. A few years ago I was writing blog posts (semi-)regularly for O’Reilly. This is the one that probably got the most feedback. I’m reprinting it now because a) it’s pretty hard to find on the O’Reilly site and b) it’s relevant to a couple of conversations […]

DBIC vs DBI

Three times in the last few months I’ve had the “DBIC or raw DBI” discussion. People have told me that they don’t use DBIC because raw DBI is better. And each time, the person promoting DBI in the discussion has used an argument that boils down to “DBIC is probably useful for people who don’t […]