Alpine Perl Workshop

On 2016-09-02 and 2016-09-03 I was able to visit the Alpine Perl Workshop. This was a Perl conference with around 50 participants, among them core members of the Perl community. We had mostly one track, so the documented information about the talks that were given is actually quite closely correlated to the list of talks that I have actually visited.

We had quite a diverse set of talks about technical issues but also about the role of Perl programming language in projects and in general. The speeches were in English and German…

Perl 6 is now a reality. It can be used together with Perl 5, there are ways to embed them within each other and they seem to work reasonably well. This fills some of the gaps of Perl 5, since the set of modules is by far not as complete as for Perl 5.

Perl 5 has since quite a few years established a time boxed release schedule. Each year they ship a new major release. The previous two releases are supported for bugfixes. The danger that major Linux distributions remain on older releases has been banned. Python 3 has been released in 2008 and still in 2016 Python 2.7 is what is usually used and shipped with major Linux distributions. It looks like Perl 5 is there to stay, not be replaced by Perl 6, which is a quite different language that just shares the name and the community. But the recent versions are actually adopted and the incompatible changes are so little that they do not hurt too much, usually. An advantage of Perl is the CPAN repository for libraries. It is possible to test new versions against a ton of such libraries and to find out, where it might break or even providing fixes for the library.

An interesting issue is testing of software. For continuous integration we can now find servers and they will run against a configurable set of Perl versions. But using different Linux distributions or even non-Linux-systems becomes a more elaborate issue. People willing to test new versions of Perl or of libraries on exotic hardware and OS are still welcome and often they discover a weakness that might be of interest even for the mainstream platforms in the long run.

I will leave it with this. You can find more information in the web site of the conference.

And some of the talks are on youtube already.

It was fun to go there, I learned a lot and met nice people. It would be great to be able to visit a similar event again…