DEV Community: Gábor Szabó

Perl 🐪 Weekly #791 - The Dark Side is here!

Gábor Szabó — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:44:02 +0000

Originally published at Perl Weekly 791

Hi there!

MetaCPAN has a night mode.

Underbar has a new episode.

The Lacuana Expanse is back.

Enjoy your week!

--
Your editor: Gabor Szabo.

Announcements

The Lacuna Expanse: Updates Since We Last Saw Each Other by Natalie Rose

A new community-run reboot of The Lacuna Expanse. TLE Community

Dancer2 2.2.1 released (security)by Jason A. Crome

Dancer2 2.2.0 released; security updates PLEASE READby Jason A. Crome

Podcast

Olaf Kolkman (part 2)by Philippe Bruhat

The Underbar, episode 10. Olaf Kolkman has had a long career in networking and Open Source that led him to be working on Internet Technology, Policy and Advocacy at the Internet Society. In September 2025, we had a long conversation with him. In this second part of our discussion, we discussed the Internet Society (ISOC) and managing volunteer organisations.

Articles

DARK MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODEby Olaf Alders

MetaCPAN Dark mode

NWC2MusicXMLby Nigel Horne

That is NoteWorthy Composer 2 to MusicXML converter Music::NWC2MusicXML

Reflecting on Mirrors — Part IIby Rob Lauer

How to compile WWW::Curl on AIX 7.2 and 7.3 with IBM xlC

WFC in Perl: A Server-Driven UI Approach for PerlBut when I visit WebForms on MetaCPAN it say 'Error rendering POD for WebForms.pm - Requested resource is a binary file'. What does this mean?

Reflecting on Mirrors — Part Iby Rob Lauer

Amazon::S3 v2.1.0 - On Being an S3 Clientby Rob Lauer

ANNOUNCE: Perl.Wiki V 1.54, etcby Ron Savage

Zero is a measurement: reading JSON latency events in Perl

Discussion

How to report bugs on cpan.org?

Perl

This week in PSC (235) | 2026-09-14

The Weekly Challenge

The Weekly Challenge by Mohammad Sajid Anwar will help you step out of your comfort-zone. You can even win prize money of $50 by participating in the weekly challenge. We pick one champion at the end of the month from among all of the contributors during the month, thanks to the sponsor Marc Perry.

The Weekly Challenge - 392by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Convert Palindrome" and "Words Length Product". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ.

RECAP - The Weekly Challenge - 391by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Array Median" and "Arrange Box" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy.

TWC391by Ali Moradi

Ali has mentioned in post the perfectly clean, practical, and well-structured solutions implemented in Perl coding for both tasks worth noting. The post rates excellently when it comes to its ability to handle edge cases related to the median of an array. The 2D box-stacking task is efficiently solved by the implementation of the dynamic programming approach to Longest Increasing Subsequence problem in this post.

Median Boxesby Bob Lied

The blog post by Bob, is a great and user-friendly demonstration of solving problems using modern Perl programming language. It combines the intuitive comparisons of algorithms supported with some presented empirical data for median problems and modern object-oriented practices such as utilisation of class syntax of Perl 5.44 and object overloading.

Two Optimisation Tasks in the Weekly Challenge 391by E. Choroba

E. Choroba has offered a detailed analysis of Perl Weekly Challenge 391, focusing on various algorithms used in this challenge. This analysis is not limited to basic algorithms. With the help of extensive benchmarking, he has shown the effectiveness of using list slices for calculating median values and has provided detailed analysis of using trim operation in path state processing, which makes it possible to change a complex algorithm into an efficient and scalable one.

The Weekly Challenge 391by Luboš Kolouch

This post by Lubos provides clean, easily readable multi-lingual solutions for both problems described in the challenge. The solutions in this post are characterised by the simple logic of the implementation, efficiently implementing the array median calculation along with boxes stacking through structured iterative checks, which makes the post a valuable one for both Perl and Python developers.

Perl Weekly Challenge 391by W Luis Mochan

W. Luis Mochán contributes a smart, very concise Perl example to Weekly Challenge 391 indicating that complicated algorithmic problems can be simplified down to expressive and concise solutions. He shows a good understanding of Perl's functional abilities through one-liners and takes them further in building an understandable production-type script ready for calculating arrays medians and working out box-nesting relationships.

Arrays of Numbers, Arrays of Boxesby Matthias Muth

Matthias gives an exemplary explanation of the two components of Challenge 391. He provides a thorough explanation of the mathematical and algorithmic aspects through neat array merging in the median calculation and a smart way of solving the box-nesting challenge, which is a valuable resource for all Perl practitioners.

Old King Cole Was A Merry Old Soulby Packy Anderson

Packy's blog post, provides an easy to understand, multilingual summary of both challenge tasks in Perl, Raku, Python, and Elixir. His methodology is different in that he is able to use pre-sorted inputs when merging arrays, which makes the explanation of algorithms entertaining and it even includes some musical aspects.

Medians and stacksby Peter Campbell Smith

In his post, Peter takes an impressively straightforward approach that prioritises the clarity of coding instead of extreme conciseness of the code. His approach uses simple array concatenation and arithmetic checking of the index for median computation as well as there is a thorough input/output reporting that facilitates understanding of the logic.

The Weekly Challenge - 391 TASK #1: Array Medianby Reinier Maliepaard

Reinier's work on Perl Weekly Challenge 391 showcases a great, nicely formatted technique in Task 1 called "Array Median". His work hard on clarity and correctness throughout the post, attempting simple merging of sorted collections and finding medians all the while upholding the cleanliness of the code.

The Weekly Challenge #391by Robbie Hatley

Robbie has done an excellent job with his report for Weekly Challenge #391, pointing to practicality in Task 1 as he restores order in merged arrays so that they will be accurate even if taken in any order. For Task 2, he impressively simplifies the nesting of boxes in 2D to a problem of finding the Longest Increasing Subsequence in 1D, which becomes O(n log n) using patience sorting and binary search.

Arrange the Median Boxby Roger Bell West

Roger gives a straight to the point contribution for Weekly Challenge #391 that includes effective reasoning for array median and good Depth-First Search method for box nesting. The input dimensions pre-sorting ensures the correctness of the order in which it is traversed. The solutions in various programming languages including Raku and Rust and PostScript show exceptional level of polyglotism.

Arranging thingsby Simon Green

Simon has written an interesting and easy to follow post solving the problem in the Weekly Challenge, explaining how to go about performing the task in both Python and Perl. His write-up is remarkable in its ability to provide clear explanations of the algorithm, achieving a nice balance between the practical need for readability and the desire for over-optimisation.

Weekly collections

NICEPERL's listsby Miguel Prz

Great CPAN modules released last week.

Events

Amsterdam PM bijeenkomstOctober 06, 2026

Boston Perl Mongers virtual monthlyOctober 12 2026

MCP - Model Context Protocol in Perl: From Web App to AI Tools - with Dave CrossOctober 21, 2026

Punk: Perl MVC, compiled at bootNovember 16, 2026

London Perl & Raku Workshop 2026November 21, 2026

YAPC::Tokyo 2026November 27, 2026

German Perl/Raku Workshop 2027April 14-16, 2027

You joined the Perl Weekly to get weekly e-mails about the Perl programming language and related topics.

Want to see more? See the archives of all the issues.

Not yet subscribed to the newsletter? Join us free of charge!

Perl 🐪 Weekly #790 - Perl and CPANSec

Gábor Szabó — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 11:18:33 +0000

Originally published at Perl Weekly 790

Hi there,

An effort is made by people who either maintain the security of software languages behind the scenes and whose work is not visible to the general public. In the case of Perl and the CPAN, the organisation to watch over the matter is known as CPANSec, a group created to oversee the activities connected with the detection and remediation of risks in a large number of different open-source software components. Instead of isolating from other professionals in this area, the CPANSec acts as a channel of communication between the software developers carrying out their activities and the representatives of the open-source community at large.

As far as it concerns the importance of the CPANSec group today, it should be mentioned that it adopts a proactive position in relation to solving safety issues connected with software supply chains. When there is a demand for investigating open-source libraries, this organisation comes up with strategies, releases informative materials, and assumes the function of a reference point in case of the mentioned issues.

In the end, CPANSec serves as a valuable reminder that in technology resilience, as important as the code is the people. A culture where safety is default is established by creating transparent reporting rules, reducing the time for disclosure, and raising consultants' awareness about safe coding. Organisations using Perl technology can be assured that CPANSec is vigilant in its role as a guardian.

I met the real people behind the CPANSec when I attended the Perl Toolchain Summit 2025 in Germany. They are doing incredible job. Olaf Alders, recently shared the inside story in this very detailed log post. On a similar note, I came across a tech paper titled: Testing as a Certification Approach shared by Alberto Simões. If you are a CPAN contributor, it is recommended to include SECURITY.md in the distribution. Here is one such, I shipped with PAGI::FastAPI . I noticed others have also started adding this document.

Let's end this on happy note, it is nice to see so many active CPAN contributors. I find it hard to catch up with latest creations. At times, it goes above my head, still high regard to each contributors. You don't need to use it to appreciate the contribution. I love reading others creation, it gives me new ideas and satisfaction. Naming one contributor would be unfair, you already know them. We as a community, should encourage and promote each contributions. There is an online event organised by Gabor Szabor titled Punk: Perl MVC, compiled at boot. Please register if you haven't already done so.

Enjoy rest of the newsletter.

--
Your editor: Mohammad Sajid Anwar.

Announcements

HeroDevs Donates $10,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundationby Olaf Alders

Olaf has announced that HeroDevs has donated $10,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF), promoting how corporations' contributions support the essential features of community infrastructure, security work such as CPAN Security Group, and maintenance of ecosystem.

The videos of the German Perl Workshop 2026 are onlineby Max Maischein

The videos are now online on Youtube. Thanks again to all people presenting their projects and insights.

The Lightning Talks of the German Perl Workshop 2026 are onlineby Max Maischein

Thanks to some crafty editing by Lee, the lightning talks are also online on Youtube.

Articles

Running Perl/PAGI applications on Cloudflare Workers via WebAssemblyby Andrew Speer

Andrew makes an interesting breakthrough by using zeroperl to run Perl/PAGI web apps on Cloudflare Workers using WebAssembly. Packing in working demos with WebSockets and D1 database support, it opens up incredible new edge-hosting options for the Perl ecosystem.

PAGI Edge Cases: When to Spec and When is Silence OK?by John Napiorkowski

John observes protocol design through the appropriate handling of post-disconnection implementation of the receive() function in PAGI. He discusses particular nice cases, real-life failures, and technical shortcomings in order to better illustrate the necessity to find the right balance between strict protocol specifications and reasonable usability for developers. A good read for async Perl developers and all the people interested in low-level web interface specifications.

Grants

Maintaining Perl (Tony Cook) August 2026

Maintaining Perl 5 Core (Dave Mitchell): August 2026

The Weekly Challenge

The Weekly Challenge by Mohammad Sajid Anwar will help you step out of your comfort-zone. You can even win prize money of $50 by participating in the weekly challenge. We pick one champion at the end of the month from among all of the contributors during the month, thanks to the sponsor Marc Perry.

The Weekly Challenge - 391by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Array Median" and "Arrange Box". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ.

RECAP - The Weekly Challenge - 390by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Decode String" and "Order Characters" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy.

Weird Ways to Wrangle Wordsby Bob Lied

This article provides an example of efficient coding methods for solving problems. It points out how stepping back can lead to tidy solutions in Perl. Bob presents simple and efficient solutions to two problems, using regular expressions to solve nested string decoding and applying a depth-first search method to a string reordering problem.

Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 390by Jaldhar H. Vyas

Jaldhar writes a very neat post that combines solid engineering with solid algorithmic thinking. His approach in Task 1 uses stacks to deal with nested encodings without the cost of recursion, and his insight for Task 2 that k > 1 simply reduces to sorting means he has turned a difficult state-space problem into an efficient O(n log n) solution.

Decoded Permutationsby Jorg Sommrey

This article is an exceptionally informative technical paper that raises conventional algorithm solving to an entirely different level. The fact Jorg has proven that moves for k > 1 cover symmetric group Sn enables them to avoid lengthy graph search state spaces and perform optimal O(n log n) character sorting, together with very concise implementations in both Perl and J.

The Weekly Challenge 390by Luboš Kolouch

This blog post is an outstanding and organised guide to the solutions for the Perl Weekly Challenge containing idiomatic coding and sound algorithmic reasoning. Lubos uses brief explanations to clarify complex problems and produce clear, fast code that the Perl community can use as a guide.

Perl Weekly Challenge 390by W Luis Mochan

The post is noteworthy in the light of it's neat and crisp demonstration of the brilliance of Perl as a programming language by way of presenting a tricky logic problem as a format of a few short functional lines of code. The solutions presented by him is characterised by use of regular expression substitutions with iterative processing using the /e flag together with the List::Util::minstr module that uses an algorithm based on the principle of recursion.

How does it feel to decode me like you do?by Packy Anderson

Packy presents an exceedingly coherent and practical example of resolving string-manipulating and character-ordering issues in various languages in this article. It gives a clear insight into specific behaviour of regex in particular languages, particularly comparing how string interpolation works in Raku and where quotemeta is applied in Perl. This makes it a very educational article for multi-language developers. He also demonstrates good skills in iterative pattern matching as the implemented solutions are simple and comprehensible and allow to outline advantages of each particular programming language.

Multiply and orderby Peter Campbell Smith

The contribution of Peter in Week 390 presents a creative stack-based technique which brings the conventional regex-replacement process for string decoding to a new level. The method uses a stack to keep track of the active multiplication factors and thus it demonstrates efficient state management.

The Weekly Challenge - 390: Decode Stringby Reinier Maliepaard

Reinier's article on Perl Weekly Challenge 390 elaborates a simple and systematic answer to the task "Decode String." The post is notable for a clear, idiomatic Perl implementation that makes the process of string expansion very easy to understand.

Decode the Orderby Roger Bell West

This article offers a detailed and interesting presentation of Weekly Challenge 390. Roger presents his innovative switch from regex-based compression in Perl to depth-first search-based state-space search in Rust and PostScript in an excellent way. Moreover, Roger's clever way of using sorted BTreeSet builds a strong algorithmic approach throughout programming languages.

The First Expansionby Simon Green

In his post, Simon lays out a well-organised and clear explanation of Weekly Challenge 390 through the use of Python. His clever application of re.sub with a custom callback function simplifies the process of dealing with nested brackets in the string decoding assignment. Furthermore, Simon's use of a recursive search through state space, with visited set memoization, is instrumental in solving the challenge of ordering characters such that their arrangement is the lexicographically smallest one.

Rakudo

2026.35 Infinity Revisitedby Elizabeth Mattijsen

Weekly collections

NICEPERL's listsby Miguel Prz

Great CPAN modules released last week;
MetaCPAN weekly report.

Events

Amsterdam PM bijeenkomstOctober 06, 2026

Boston Perl Mongers virtual monthlyOctober 12 2026

MCP - Model Context Protocol in Perl: From Web App to AI Tools - with Dave CrossOctober 21, 2026

Punk: Perl MVC, compiled at bootNovember 16, 2026

London Perl & Raku Workshop 2026November 21, 2026

YAPC::Tokyo 2026November 27, 2026

German Perl/Raku Workshop 2027April 14-16, 2027

You joined the Perl Weekly to get weekly e-mails about the Perl programming language and related topics.

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(C) Copyright Gabor Szabo
The articles are copyright the respective authors.

Perl 🐪 Weekly #789 - The impact of LLMs on Perl

Gábor Szabó — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 09:32:44 +0000

Originally published at Perl Weekly 789

Hi there,

The videos from the German Perl Workshop are available. They look very interesting, but not surprisingly many of them are in German. As you go through the list when you encounter one that you'd want to see if it was in English, let me know! I'll contact the speakers and I'll ask if they would be interested giving an English version of their presentation through the online Perl Maven events.

This, of course, reminds me that we are going to have such an online presentation today. The title is Async, Type-Safe, and Secure: Perl's Answer to FastAPI and the presenter is Mohammad Sajid Anwar, the other editor of this newsletter who also runs The Weekly Challenge and does a tons of other things. You can still register. Before the presentation begins we are going to have 30 minutes for mingling. That is, you'll have the opportunity to introduce yourself and build connections.

On our events page you can find the full list of Perl-related events we are aware of. There are a few in-person events and a few online events.

Enjoy your week!

--
Your editor: Gabor Szabo.

Articles

CPAN Uploads Are Up 50% Year-over-Year by Olaf Alders

What is the impact of LLMs on the Open Source ecosystem in general and on Perl in patricular? Let's talk about our corner.

DBI now has a minimum version of v5.12

AmberDB - An Embedded NoSQL Database Engine for Perl by Maruf Çetin

AmberDB is a high-performance, schema-driven NoSQL database engine for Perl, featuring ACID transactions and precomputed inverted indexing on top of Berkeley DB (DB_File). AmberDB on MetaCPAN. Based on the AGENTS.md file it is being developed on MS Windows with the aid of LLMs.

CVE-2026-18108: Net::SAML2 Authentication Bypass via Unsigned Encrypted Assertions (CVSS 9.8) Net::SAML2 provides SAML2 bindings and protocol implementation. This CVE along with a few others is already fixed.

Discussion

perl in cybersecurity? Should you learn Perl these days? What is the power of perl in cybersecurity today?

The Weekly Challenge

The Weekly Challenge - 390by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Decode String" and "Order Characters". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ.

RECAP - The Weekly Challenge - 389by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Reorder Notes" and "ZigZag Subarray" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy.

TWC389by Ali Moradi

The post features a simple and neat solution in Perl programming where multiple tests have been performed. The reordered notes solution stands out because of a straightforward mapping of array slots, and the zigzag subarray solution works well in terms of state change tracking. All in all, it is a good way of demonstrating a reliable well-tested code that has undergone some form of automatic testing through Test::More.

ZigZag Reorderby Arne Sommer

The article delivers an exceptionally clear and pragmatic breakdown of solving Weekly Challenge #389 using Raku. The post excels technically through its clean slice assignment for note reordering and its clever state-tracking approach using Raku's native gather/take construct to efficiently parse contiguous zigzag subarrays.

ZigZag Melodiesby Jorg Sommrey

This technical article offers some meaningful and mathematically sound treatment of Weekly Challenge #389 using both Perl and J. What's impressive here is an exhaustive analysis of the permutations involved followed by some wonderful demonstration of how to implement elegant array solutions with the help of Perl's PDL vector library and J expressive array primitives.

The Weekly Challenge 389by Luboš Kolouch

The post does an excellent job in Task 1 by successfully using idiomatic functional constructs (array slicing in Perl and zip sorting in Python) to avoid the need for explicit loops. In addition, Task 2's linear O(N) finite state machine gives it an elegant one-pass solution that takes care of tricky directional resets and edge cases.

Perl Weekly Challenge 389by W Luis Mochan

This article showcases an amazingly smart and practical Perl solution for Perl Weekly Challenge 389. It shows how well the language is mastered by implementing tail recursion to avoid using explicit loops in Task 1, including thorough try/catch validation, and using the spaceship operator (<=>) combined with array transformation methods for a smart solution of the ZigZag subarray problem.

Zig Zag Melodiesby Packy Anderson

Packy provides a delightful multilingual guide to Weekly Challenge #389 tackling different programming languages including Raku, Perl, Python, and Elixir. The post excels in its practical treatment of data structures across paradigms through methods such as list zipping and the use of native multi-variable loops in Perl 5.40. It also includes precise comparative implementation along with simple code samples and output verification.

Musical zigzagsby Peter Campbell Smith

Peter came up with an ingenious and creative take on Task 1, which, thanks to a do ... until structure, avoids the complications of looping altogether. His meticulousness, such as the use of true Unicode sharps / flats and the placement of tests inspired by famous composers like Mozart—results in a highly polished and engaging technical article.

The Weekly Challenge #389by Robbie Hatley

Robbie Hatley, in his post for Weekly Challenge #389, provides a very practical and straightforward explanation of the two assignments. He offers a very interesting idea regarding the array slice assignment for its usage for destination indexing in Task 1.

Zigzag Reorderby Roger Bell West

The article by Roger regarding Weekly Challenge #389 gives a good explanation of both challenges through various programming languages. The sequential explanation of the code written in functional programming language of Kotlin for sorting notes and using Perl programming language as the core programming framework makes it simple to understand complicated situations.

Zigzag notesby Simon Green

Simon's article presents an easy-to-understand, Python-centric explanation of Weekly Challenge #389. His comments successfully spell out the task procedures in a clear, understandable form of Python, which is useful for developers who are in search of reference implementations for array modification and sequence searching.

Weekly collections

NICEPERL's listsby Miguel Prz

Great CPAN modules released last week.

Event reports

The videos of the German Perl Workshop 2026 are onlineby Max Maischein

The playlist.

Events

Async, Type-Safe, and Secure: Perl's Answer to FastAPI with Mohammad Sajid AnwarSeptember 7, 2026

Boston Perl Mongers virtual monthlySeptember 8, 2026

Purdue Perl Mongers (HackLafayette) - TBASeptember 9, 2026

Amsterdam PM bijeenkomstOctober 06, 2026

MCP - Model Context Protocol in Perl: From Web App to AI Tools - with Dave CrossOctober 21, 2026

Punk: Perl MVC, compiled at bootNovember 16, 2026

London Perl & Raku Workshop 2026November 21, 2026

YAPC::Tokyo 2026November 27, 2026

German Perl/Raku Workshop 2027April 14-16, 2027

You joined the Perl Weekly to get weekly e-mails about the Perl programming language and related topics.

Want to see more? See the archives of all the issues.

Not yet subscribed to the newsletter? Join us free of charge!

JavaScript events in the next 10 days

Gábor Szabó — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:50:10 +0000

I am building a site to make it easy to find both in-person and online events. It clearly needs a lot of improvements.

This is what I got out of it now.

2026-08-20 (online) 🎙️ Metarhia community call
2026-08-20 (in-person) Boston TypeScript Club
2026-08-20 (in-person) Coding Agent con TS && AWS
2026-08-21 (in-person) IKIGAI
2026-08-22 (in-person) React Meetup #107
2026-08-23 (in-person) Code and Tea at Panera
2026-08-25 (in-person) Your Agent is Starving
2026-08-25 (in-person) Isolation: VMs, Containers, Namespaces, Oh my! | DenverScript August 2026
2026-08-26 (in-person) JavaScript Luzern Grill Edition #5
2026-08-26 (online) JavaScriptMN Monthly Event: Open Floor Show/Tell and Discussion
2026-08-27 (in-person) Frontendistim Community August Meetup at Matia!
2026-08-27 (in-person) Paderborn.JS Meetup 2026
2026-08-27 (in-person) Jozi.JS August - Make the code work
2026-08-27 (online) 🎙️ Metarhia community call
2026-08-27 (in-person) Why to choose Ember.js in 2026
2026-08-28 (in-person) Zagreb Developers Drinkup

Perl 🐪 Weekly #786 - CPAN Day

Gábor Szabó — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 09:07:39 +0000

Originally published at Perl Weekly 786

Hi there,

Every year on August 16th, the Perl community celebrates CPAN Day in recognition of the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), which has been helping many applications for more than three decades. It is noteworthy that CPAN is neither a simple collection of coding resources nor a repository of modular code because it is one of the oldest and most reliable open-source systems in computer programming history. CPAN Day celebrations give us a chance to consider the volume of work that is performed to support this library every day.

At the core of the success of CPAN is its strong contributor network. Thousands of people are improving, supporting, documenting, and regulating thousands of modules every day, enabling developers worldwide to avoid duplicating efforts. That said, CPAN Day is a good day to celebrate all CPAN contributors that make this system work perfectly. As we are celebrating this day, it is important that all CPAN authors should make an effort to remove older obsolete distributions from PAUSE directories.

For me, I released Map::Tube::Plugin::Graph v1.1.2 to CPAN and also mark handful of older releases for deletion from PAUSE directories.

Last week, Gabor mentioned about upcoming online presentation, Async, Type-Safe, and Secure: Perl's Answer to FastAPI. Watching the growing list of audience, I am feeling little nervous. I had prepared the presentation slides as soon as I confirmed the event. But then keep updating the slides as the topic, PAGI::FastAPI is continuously improving. Currently working on to support message queue to PAGI::FasAPI. If I find time, I might add slides about message queue as well after the release. A big thanks to John Napiorkowski for advise and suggestions. I wouldn't have come this far without his support and encouragement. By the way, he is the creator of Perl Asynchronous Gateway Interface (PAGI).

Enjoy rest of the newsletter.

--
Your editor: Mohammad Sajid Anwar.

Articles

PAGI::FastAPI + WebSocketby Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Let's build online chat using PAGI::FastAPI and Mojo::Pg. It is incredible easy to build the app with little effort.

PAGI::FastAPI + DBIx::Class::Asyncby Mohammad Sajid Anwar

When building async web framework, it is obvious to bring DBIx::Class::Async into the fold. In this post, you will see how database handle is injected as dependency. One of the cool features, my personal favourite.

Access / Refresh Tokenby Mohammad Sajid Anwar

A quick introduction to Access Token and Refresh Token, and end up creating a handy web application to demo the workings.

pperl 0.6.12+ - "Shall we play a game?"by Richard C. Jelinek

In versions 0.6.12 and up of pperl the development speed of the application is assessed while the Computer Language Benchmarks Game is updated. Initial tests show that the benchmark performance is 36 times better than standard Perl performance triggering redesigning of the JIT architecture to compete with Node.js/V8.

Pacman in Perl/Tkby Alex

In Pacman in Perl/Tk, Alex goes back to a project he worked on in 2013 in order to analyse the separation of logical state from visual representation. By implementing the maze as a two-dimensional array where the shifting and collision functions use tile coordinates instead of canvas pixels, the article is able to exhibit a surprisingly elegant architecture similar to the Model-View approach using standard Perl and Tk.

25+ useful and commonly used Regular Expressionsby Dennis

In this article, Dennis offers a useful reference guide containing patterns most often needed in various elements of work, namely for matching numbers, validating usernames, carrying out sophisticated RFC-compliant email verifications, and web scraping. The article is informative and useful for developers who perform tasks related to parsing and validating data.

Grants

Maintaining Perl 5 Core (Dave Mitchell): July 2026

Maintaining Perl (Tony Cook) July 2026

The Weekly Challenge

The Weekly Challenge - 387by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Rearrange Binary String" and "Atoms Count". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ.

RECAP - The Weekly Challenge - 386by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Reverse Base" and "Rational Numbers" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy.

TWC386by Ali Moradi

Ali's answer uses a blend of conciseness in Perl with strong problem-solving skills in The Weekly Challenge assignment number 386. The first task of converting numbers from one base to another uses nicely achieved hash mapping and destructive string extraction, while the second task showcases impressive regex skills and presents a method for normalisation of decimals with no floating-point errors.

Reverse Lanoitarby Arne Sommer

In this post, Arne demonstrates how Raku works in a visually rich and elegant way. The blog is technologically satisfying as it best employs Raku features such as regex pattern matching, applied in decimal representation, and hyperoperators, which are good in performing precise comparison of rational numbers using cross multiplication.

All Your Base Are Belong to Rational Numbersby Bob Lied

Here Bob provides a concise and logical approach to this week’s Perl Weekly Challenge. He successfully addresses the tasks connected with rational numbers through using Perl’s built-in bigrat module that makes it easy to deal with fractional numbers, proving that intelligence in the use of libraries can make solving complex problems in number theory much easier.

Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 386by Jaldhar H. Vyas

The post offers an informative object-oriented perspective on Perl Weekly Challenge 386 in relation to Raku and Perl. Jaldhar thoroughly explains the procedure of dynamic base conversion in Task 1 with the use of Meta Object Protocol wrapping methodology, while the implemented Fraction class is presented in Task 2 for eliminating repetitive decimal fractions using GCD method.

Periodic Basesby Jorg Sommrey

The post discusses an admiringly strict mathematical and programming technique of solving the problems of Weekly Challenge 386 with the help of Perl and J languages. Jorg manages to dispense with the floating-point precision problems thanks to the natural algebraic proofs and succinct, neat implementations.

Perl Weekly Challenge 386by W Luis Mochan

The message outlines a very concise and precise solution to the Weekly Challenge 386 by Perl. The repetition of decimal fractions is modeled by using the knowledge of the geometric series, and W. Luis Mochan utilises the method of cross-multiplication, thus avoiding the pitfalls of floating-point precision. In addition to effective error handling, the message offers effective prototypes and other code design approaches.

We’re Talkin’ Algebraby Packy Anderson

This post demonstrates a thorough, organised, and very instructive description of how to solve the Perl Weekly Challenge 386 in various programming languages. It is impressive how Packy knows how to present complex mathematical algorithms in a useful step-by-step way, paying attention to such smart language tools as list inversion in Raku or pair transformations.

Hitting the bases with recurring numbersby Peter Campbell Smith

In week 386, Peter presents a neat, efficient, and very strong Perl design for the base conversion process. The blog post is remarkable because there is an insightful mention of the special cases, and all the edge cases are taken into account, for example, the digit limits and base limits, which makes it different from the others.

The Weekly Challenge #386by Robbie Hatley

Robbie has provided a very efficient and practical solution for Perl Weekly Challenge #386 using robust and standard Perl core/CPAN modules. In doing so, he has displayed a very analytical and practical approach and avoided tripping over the standard floating-point precision problems and unnecessary re-implementations with the nice adaptation of the base conversion to the custom characters.

A Rational Reverseby Roger Bell West

The article offers a neat and clear solution to Weekly Challenge 386 through the transformation of arbitrary bases and recurring decimals into appropriate rational fractions. Roger is adept at using solutions based upon a combination of excellent mathematical reasoning—like reduction of fractions through GCD/LCM in Perl—and unsophisticated parsing methods, thus presenting a fascinating way to demonstrate string parsing and implementing mathematical data structures.

The Rational Baseby Simon Green

The article offers a clear and simple explanation to solve the problem in Weekly Challenge 386 with the help of Python and Perl. Simon has used regular expressions efficiently to get the separated integer parts, finite decimal and repeating sequences of digits. The string extension technique discussed in the article helps the readers in comparison of rational numbers without complex fraction calculations.

Rakudo

2026.32 Dan Floating Hexby Elizabeth Mattijsen

Weekly collections

NICEPERL's listsby Miguel Prz

Great CPAN modules released last week.

Events

Amsterdam PM bijeenkomstSeptember 01, 2026

Async, Type-Safe, and Secure: Perl's Answer to FastAPI with Mohammad Sajid AnwarSeptember 7, 2026

Purdue Perl Mongers (HackLafayette) - TBASeptember 9, 2026

Amsterdam PM bijeenkomstOctober 06, 2026

MCP - Model Context Protocol in Perl: From Web App to AI Tools - with Dave CrossOctober 21, 2026

Punk: Perl MVC, compiled at bootNovember 16, 2026

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Online Python events between Aug 17 - Aug 26

Gábor Szabó — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 04:41:04 +0000

I found the following Python-related online events for the next 10 days.

Online events remove the physical barrier of who can participate. What remain are the time-zone differences and the language barrier. In order to make it easier for you to find events that match those constraints I started to collect the online events where you can filter by topic and time. In this table you can find events with starting time in a few selected time-zones. I hope it makes it easier to find an event that is relevant to you. The data and the code generating the pages are all on GitHub. Share your ideas on how to improve the listings to help you more.

Title	UTC	EST	PST	NZL
Monday office hour	Aug 17 16:00	Aug 17 12:00	Aug 17 09:00	Aug 18 04:00
Managing Secrets in Python	Aug 18 07:00	Aug 18 03:00	Aug 18 00:00	Aug 18 19:00
An Evening of Python Coding	Aug 19 00:00	Aug 18 20:00	Aug 18 17:00	Aug 19 12:00
Getting Started with Tabular Foundation Models with TabPFN	Aug 20 16:00	Aug 20 12:00	Aug 20 09:00	Aug 21 04:00
Databricks End-to-End Crash Course - DEB Learning Session # 3	Aug 21 06:00	Aug 21 02:00	Aug 20 23:00	Aug 21 18:00
Online: SD Python Saturday Study Group	Aug 22 17:00	Aug 22 13:00	Aug 22 10:00	Aug 23 05:00
Christchurch Python Meetup - August 2026	Aug 25 05:45	Aug 25 01:45	Aug 24 22:45	Aug 25 17:45
PyOrl @ ODevs Social	Aug 25 23:00	Aug 25 19:00	Aug 25 16:00	Aug 26 11:00
Think Functionally	Aug 27 02:00	Aug 26 22:00	Aug 26 19:00	Aug 27 14:00

Perl 🐪 Weekly #784 - Perl Catalyst

Gábor Szabó — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:00:35 +0000

Originally published at Perl Weekly 784

Hi there,

I remember the release of Catalyst, MVC web application framework in 2005. It was the first time, I heard about MVC. Unfortunately, I never got to work with it until I joined my current work place. We have very well crafted application using Catalyst. The creator of Catalyst, John Napiorkowski, recently shared his plan to revisit Catalyst and named the project (working name), CatalystNext. The details of the project is shared in the post. I am going to use this opportunity to learn Catalyst from zero.

In case you missed, we just had two maintenance releases, Perl v5.40.5 and Perl v5.42.3. The highlights of both releases was security patches, CVE-2026-8376, CVE-2026-57432 and CVE-2026-13221. Thank you core team members.

I am a big fan of experimental class feature of latest Perl. Recently I came across a documentary titled, The Java Story. It brought back some old memories when I was offered to pick the languages: Perl and Java. No prize for the guessing the answer, I chose Perl. After watching the documentary, I decided to checkout how experimental class deals with Encapsulation, Reflection and Immutable Class. Please checkout the blog post below where I shared my findings.

I came across this talk, Regex Optimization From Hours to Second by Deven Corzine. I had to watch it few times to get my head around it. Talks like this make attending Perl conference worth it. Another talk that caught my eyes, All About Test2 by Chad Graham. Thanks to TPRC team for sharing the video.

Another exciting news, pperl, now has Perl v5.44 as compatibility target. Please checkout the details in the post.

Enjoy rest of the newsletter.

--
Your editor: Mohammad Sajid Anwar.

Announcements

Perl v5.40.5by Steve Hay

The maintenace release of Perl v5.40.5 with security patches.

Perl v5.42.3by Steve Hay

The maintenace release of Perl v5.42.3 with security patches.

ANNOUNCE: Perl.Wiki V 1.51, CPAN::MetaCurator V 1.27, etcby Ron Savage

The highlight of latest release of Perl.Wiki is CPAN::MetaCurator v1.27.

Articles

The Future Isn’t Evenly Distributedby Dave Cross

By analysing the request for support on a 25-year-old Perl CGI script that he recently got, Dave Cross explains why developers’ apps are usually lagging behind in technology. Developers should realise that technological advancements do not solely depend on innovations in technology but also on economic factors. Indeed, businesses usually do not require the latest tools, they seek a way to make yesterday’s solutions work today.

Immutable Classby Mohammad Sajid Anwar

In this post, I analyse the treatment of immutability in contemporary Perl by comparing and contrasting the explicit runtime optimisation provided by Moose to the experimental class features offered by core Perl concerning automatic enforcement of immutability from an external perspective.

Reflection/MOPby Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Here I document the evolution of code reflection and metaobject protocols from Lisp and CLOS all the way to contemporary object systems. And finally turn the attention to how Perl has evolved—starting with the first implementation of a symbol table with %main:: and the Moose framework's use of Class::MOP, and now to features that have become intrinsic to the language like the isa operator, CLASS and capability testing via $obj->can().

CatalystNext: What Should We Keep, Change, and Rethink? by John Napiorkowski

John Napiorkowski starts the conversation on CatalystNext, which refers to a new concept associated with the old Catalyst Perl web framework on the basis of PAGI technology. In this article, he weighs the benefits of keeping action-subroutine attributes rather than using route DSL, improving the syntax of the chained dispatch method, separating code bundles from URLs, and improving state/service boundaries while avoiding a fundamental issue of historical compatibility.

Moving Targets - PetaPerl 0.6.8by Richard C. Jelinek

PetaMem has launched the new version 0.6.8 of pperl, increasing its minimum version requirement from now on to Perl 5.44. Some of the main highlights of the release include an implemented zero-setup native DBI that allows for PostgreSQL and MySQL support via FFI without any need for XS compiling.

The Weekly Challenge

The Weekly Challenge - 385by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Uncommon Words" and "Outermost Parentheses". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ.

RECAP - The Weekly Challenge - 384by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Base N" and "Special Binary Substrings" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy.

TWC384by Ali Moradi

The solution set provided by Ali includes easy-to-read implementations in Perl, testable via Test::More. The basic conversion function works perfectly with custom symbols, and the binary substring method utilises brief regular expressions in order to achieve simplicity in its logic.

N Binary with Rakuby Arne Sommer

Arne makes use of Raku to tackle arbitrary base conversion (using multiple dispatch as well as built-in base and custom-character fallback logic for many bases up to 64) and identifies special binary substrings with the aid of subset typing, index iteration, and regex checking.

Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 384by Jaldhar H. Vyas

Jaldhar's article about Raku's Metaobject Protocol in PWC 384 presents an interesting approach in dynamically wrapping Int.base() in order to accomplish base conversions up to Base 64. When combined with the elegant solutions in Perl and Raku, this post offers an elegant and educational solution to both challenges.

Special Basesby Jorg Sommrey

Jorg's article is all about the comparison of Perl and J implementations. In Task 1, he dynamically creates an ASCII digit table which supports Base 94 without using magic literals in Perl. The function Math::Prime::Util::todigits in Perl is paired with the user-defined monadic/dyadic inverses for J. In Task 2, substring searching is converted from O(n^2) naive approach to the candidate expansion process by employing List::Gather in Perl and the fold conjunction (F:).

Perl Weekly Challenge 384by W Luis Mochan

Luis's blog uses modern Perl syntax (try/catch, use v5.40) to produce amazing compact and expressive results. The regex-based technique for Task 2 effectively solves substring matching in a one-liner, while the mathematical checks in Task 1 are encapsulated neatly via a one-liner.

A Helpful Module and a Recursive Patternby Matthias Muth

The article by Matthias provides a fabulous class in Perl programming with high efficiency. In his solution of Task 1, he makes an effective use of Math::Prime::Util::todigits function in association with lookup tables. With the help of these tricks he limits the number of bases to 64. The solution crafted by Matthias in Task 2 is even more brilliant as he writes the entire code in just a single statement. He arrives at this potential solution due to great ingenuity of his approach, based on recursive regular expressions.

A heaven on earth, they call it Base-N Streetby Packy Anderson

Packy produced multi-language project across Perl, Raku, Python, and Elixir. The first task involved building a base-N radix array algorithm without using any built-in conversion tools to introduce the nuances between different languages such as floating-point truncating in Perl's int() as opposed to divmod in Python. The second task uses the same process but applies a non-destructive regex approach and verifies digit sums to deduplicate consecutive binary substrings in the four programming languages.

The Weekly Challenge #384by Robbie Hatley

Robbie's article discusses a practical and performance-oriented solution to the jobs at hand. In Task 1, he purposefully employs Math::BigInt with GNU Multiple Precision (GMP) library for high-performance and precise conversion of bases. In Task 2, he makes use of a clear dual nested-loop algorithm to process the even-length substrings and obtain all the unique consecutive sequences in binary.

Are Your Substrings Based?by Roger Bell West

The post written by Roger suggests straightforward and practical methods for solving both problems; it has an elegant solution regarding edge cases in base-N conversions and a clear method for tracking states when analyzing binary substrings. The explanations are lucid and the implementation in Crystal is neat, making it an interesting and informative piece for anyone working on algorithmic problems.

Base substringsby Simon Green

Simon contributes a very neat and effective method for Challenge 384, which emphasises early and proper input validation as well as a clear presentation of the custom base-64 alphabet ordering. The act of generating candidate character sets before worrying about the substring matching process also greatly reinforces the explanation's clarity and results in a highly readable dual Python/Perl solution guide.

Rakudo

2026.28/29/30 Thank you!by Elizabeth Mattijsen

Weekly collections

NICEPERL's listsby Miguel Prz

Great CPAN modules released last week.

Events

Amsterdam PM bijeenkomstAugust 04, 2026

Purdue Perl Mongers (HackLafayette) - TBAAugust 12, 2026

Amsterdam PM bijeenkomstSeptember 01, 2026

Purdue Perl Mongers (HackLafayette) - TBASeptember 9, 2026

Amsterdam PM bijeenkomstOctober 06, 2026

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Perl 🐪 Weekly #782 - Perl v5.44

Gábor Szabó — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:24:22 +0000

Originally published at Perl Weekly 782

Hi there,

Finally we had maintenance release of Perl v5.44 on 15th July. This is the first release which I watched the process very closely by joining the P5P Mailing List. I have high respect to each core member. The amount of work that goes into each release is unbelievable. They discuss every minute details before commit. It's fascinating just reading the discussion. You get to know so many different aspects. The best part is anyone can take part in the discussion. Feel free to share your concern and suggestion. I am sure you will get instant response from one of the core team members.

As I am talking about Perl release, I came across something very interesting, Parallel Perl. It is also referred as pperl. As documented, it is next-generation Perl 5 runtime written in Rust, with JIT and auto-parallelization. If I am not wrong, Perl is written in C, does that mean Rust is the new C? I don't know either of them enough to read the source code. Rust has been making some noise in the Perl community.

Another big announcement by Salve J. Nilsen about the April Task Force. It sounds very heavy loaded. It is nice to see TPRF taking the security matter seriously. With the dedicated team, we are in a safe hands.

Don't forget to try the new features in v5.44 and share your experience with us. Enjoy the rest of the newsletter.

--
Your editor: Mohammad Sajid Anwar.

Announcements

Announcing the April Task ForcePermalinkby Salve Nilsen

April Task Force is set up to strengthen the CPANSec CNA Function, improve the security posture of CPAN and Perl, and to help prepare these communities for the impact expected from the general availability of security analysis-capable Large Language Models.

ANNOUNCE: Perl.Wiki V 1.50, Mojo.Wiki V 1.21 etcby Ron Savage

Two wikis, CPAN metacurator and Tree Cladogram/DAG are now available in the latest release.

Articles

DBIx::Class vs DBIOby Mohammad Sajid Anwar

I took a moment off writing the book on DBIx::Class to explore DBIO, a new competitor in the Perl ORM sector. I faced some difficulties installing the system but shared useful comparisons of standard table schemas, result classes, and test cases demonstrating the similarity.

SQL JOIN using DBIx::Classby Mohammad Sajid Anwar

In this post, I share the application of different SQL JOINs within the database application created using DBIx::Class. It illustrates the four important types of joins using an example of unit testing which employs User and Profile tables.

Flatpak with Perlby Mohammad Sajid Anwar

In this tutorial, I show how to effectively use Flatpak to containerise their Perl script in a sandbox that is isolated from the network. Using a manifest file that pulls in dependencies from CPAN, I explain how to compile and run their Perl application across all possible modern Linux distributions without running into any trouble.

SOLID using Perlby Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Having done the book on Design Patterns, it is time to talk about Design Principles. In this post, I look at SOLID design principles using Perl.

IoC using Perlby Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Having done Design Patterns and Design Principles in Perl, it is natural to discuss Inversion of Control (IoC) next.

Three ways to write a table in Podliteby Aliaksandr Zahatski

In the article, Aliaksandr Zahatski investigates the capacities for grid creation inherent in the block-markup language Podlite. The article elaborates various specific syntax types—text mode that suits for performing quick note-taking, structure block format that is meant for cell-spanning arrangements and rich content, as well as data-driven integration for processing unformatted CSV or TSV files.

Grants

PEVANS Core Perl 5: Grant Report for June 2026

Maintaining Perl (Tony Cook) June 2026

Maintaining Perl 5 Core (Dave Mitchell): June 2026

The Weekly Challenge

The Weekly Challenge - 383by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Similar List" and "Nearest RGB". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ.

RECAP - The Weekly Challenge - 382by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Hamiltonian Cycle" and "Replace Question Mark" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy.

Hamiltonian Question Markby Arne Sommer

This blog post shows the advantages of Raku by using simple recursion and backtracking for the challenging Hamiltonian Cycle problem as well as using a simple iterative queue for string replacement. Each script is provided with documentation and numerous test outputs which provide excellent learning aid for novice and expert Raku users alike.

PWC 382 Hamiltonian Cycleby Bob Lied

A superb analysis of Hamiltonian Cycle is shared in this post. Bob has superbly converted the issue into an interesting graph theory problem and has effectively proposed a powerful breadth-first search strategy. With the provision of efficient data structures, exact mathematical restrictions, and clear explanations of how the code works, this analysis is highly useful to all the persons who want to learn algorithmic Perl.

PWC 382 Replace Question Marksby Bob Lied

Bob kicks off the post by presenting an interesting technique - a concise, built-in kind of shell-like one-liner with the use of glob - followed by a discussion of a sophisticated queue-based substitution algorithm. The final description proves to be a great demonstration of how Perl can tackle string manipulation problems effectively and concisely, as a result of using smart resources like index.

Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 382by Jaldhar H. Vyas

This article provides amazing, well-analysed insights on the Perl Weekly Challenge #382, including the two similar solutions in Raku and Perl. Jaldhar excellently solves the Hamiltonian Cycle problem while defining it using adjacent graph lists. Plus, valuable information is given on how to deal with certain peculiarities of the languages.

Hamiltonian Marksby Jorg Sommrey

The article presents an outstanding technical analysis of Perl Weekly Challenge #382 using tools like Maxima and J. Jorg skillfully emphasises the greatly effective graph-theory libraries in Maxima for a quick solution of the NP-complete problem of Hamiltonian Cycle using CPAN modules such as List::Gather and Math::Prime::Util to create clear Perl code. Programmers looking for unusual mathematical syntax and language profiling will enjoy the reading.

Perl Weekly Challenge 382by W Luis Mochan

Perl Weekly Challenge #382 is reviewed in an excellent and in-depth way in this article. W. Luis Mochan wins the hearts of the readers by putting forward his compact 3-line regex-based recursive solution and then presenting the optimal way of implementation in the form of the pre-computed follower map (%follower).

The Recursive Challengeby Matthias Muth

Matthias demonstrates good layout for the code and good documentation for the code which has made it better to read. This implementation will be beneficial for engineers who want to learn about modular problem solving in Perl.

The World Turned Upside Down!by Packy Anderson

This article presents an incredibly imaginative technical analysis of the Perl Weekly Challenge #382 by the fantastic use of the inversion of an algorithm. Rather than going through all the remaining values to find their sums as squares, Packy cycles through previously-calculated squares and checks whether the differential exists, which results in a much more efficient search. It is extremely entertaining while maintaining a perfect balance between detailed explanation of graph theory and utilising code in different languages.

Hamilton’s questionsby Peter Campbell Smith

The article talks about Perl Weekly Challenge #382 in great detail, being proposed by the same person who initially proposed Hamiltonian Cycle to the community. The write-up provides historical perspective on the problem while introducing a rather ingenious way of using string matching (qq[~$possible~]) to keep track of graph adjacency and implement the task in a full Perl.

The Weekly Challenge - 382: Replace Question Markby Reinier Maliepaard

In this article, you will see a clear and straightforward solution for Task 2 of Perl Weekly Challenge #382. Reinier has perfectly delivered the main idea of the task - generating all binary combinations to replace the question marks in a very simple manner without making it unnecessarily complex. This article would be a brilliant assistance to anyone who would like to implement this task in an easy and efficient manner and yet ensure proper substitution of the strings.

Questioning the Cycleby Roger Bell West

In this post, you will find an amazing technical analysis of Perl Weekly Challenge #382, with valuable insights based on a complex multi-language approach including not only Raku but also Scala. This particular post stands out from the crowd due to the fact that Roger has created a complete stand-alone testing function (is_adjacentsquared), which allows him to confirm results produced by the algorithm and put to work an effective neighbor mapping approach based on Raku’s native Set types. The article is very informative and will be of great help for those interested in the issues of algorithmic safety, depth-first search optimization, and polyglot programming.

The Hamiltonian Questionby Simon Green

Here you will find an outstanding technical critique of the Perl Weekly Challenge #382 through the lens of Python implementations of both challenges. Simon brings a very eloquent readable solution to Task 1 which deals with the Hamiltonian Cycle graph traversal and also shares personal details about Task 2 which was based on a real-time coding-interview question. The paper demonstrates excellent use of modern algorithm patterns and provides good data on how efficient the solution is and what its limitations are.

Rakudo

2026.27 TRF Lives!by Elizabeth Mattijsen

Weekly collections

NICEPERL's listsby Miguel Prz

Great CPAN modules released last week.

Events

Perl development using AI + Open Source (online)July 29, 2026

Purdue Perl Mongers (HackLafayette) - TBAAugust 12, 2026

Purdue Perl Mongers (HackLafayette) - TBASeptember 9, 2026

You joined the Perl Weekly to get weekly e-mails about the Perl programming language and related topics.

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Perl 🐪 Weekly #780 - TRF

Gábor Szabó — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 07:27:12 +0000

Originally published at Perl Weekly 780

Hi there,

The Raku Foundation (TRF) was officially announced last month, as suggested in the post by Damian Conway. I am super happy for the core team behind Raku.

Does that mean there is no more The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF)?

Now that TRF is live, it would make sense to go back to the good old The Perl Foundation (TPF). I don't know the technical details yet, but I think it is a great move. Now Perl and Raku can live in their own worlds without any interference. It is good to see Damian promoting Raku. If I am not mistaken, even Larry was once involved in the project.

For all Perl fans, very soon there will be a major release, Perl v5.44. I am eagerly waiting for it.

Enjoy rest of the newsletter.

--
Your editor: Mohammad Sajid Anwar.

Announcements

perl-lsp version 0.6.0by Veesh Goldman

The version 0.6.0 is now available on crates.io & in both VS Code and The Zed Editor. This is a huge milestone for the Perl-LSP project with some great improvements such as smart type narrowing for block variables, smart inherited method renewal using inherited methods, and different heatmap cli for analysing function complexity and usage.

Articles

Automate Perl module testing with GitHub Actionsby Dragos Trif

This is a very handy guide that explains how to set up a CI/CD pipeline for your Perl projects via GitHub Actions. The guide elaborates on what steps to follow so that when you push code, all of the projects automatically run tests against several different Perl versions and several different operating systems. This will allow developers to check for compatibility on multiple platforms, while also providing developers with a way to keep their code at high quality with as little manual work as possible.

How One Pull Request Took App::HTTPThis to Version 1.0by Dave Cross

A simple pull request intended to improve the honesty of a startup message caused a rewrite of the architecture for App::HTTPThis. The original binding configuration was set to all interfaces, but by modifying it to use 127.0.0.1, and providing targeted support for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), this tool has come a very long way to reach a very solid, secure, cross-platform milestone for release version of 1.0.0.

Reading UTF-8 at GB/sby Christian Hansen

Christian highlights a bottleneck in Perl's read operator regarding how it counts UTF-8 sequences and introduces a high-performance workaround via Unicode::UTF8::read_utf8. By reading and validating UTF-8 streams in a single pass, this new feature achieves impressive speeds—delivering 7x to 16x faster throughput than native reads.

The AI Revolution is Validating 40 Years of Perl Philosophyby Randal Schwartz

Randal examines the relationship between the emergence of large language models and Larry Wall’s original concept of Perl as a language based on context (semiotics) and language. The shift toward a semantic/conceptual view of programming allows AI systems to start operating based on principles that have been used by Perl programmers all along, rather than forcing us to program like mathematical devices.

Web

SOAP and Perlby Mohammad Sajid Anwar

This article investigates both the past and the present of using Perl to connect to SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) web services. The article discusses how useful an existing SOAP:Lite module is for creating applications that can still be used today by legacy companies, along with performance related suggestions when working with XML payloads, WSDL files, and options for building robust API integration using modern technology.

CPAN

JSON::JSONFoldby Yair Lenga

A fresh CPAN module that helps you read compact JSON and create pretty printed representations of those same objects. JSON::JSONFold does this by building on top of existing serialisers to fold small/simple structures onto a single line, while also aligning grid-like data.

The Weekly Challenge

The Weekly Challenge - 381by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Same Row Column" and "Smaller Greater Element". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ.

RECAP - The Weekly Challenge - 380by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Sum of Frequencies" and "Reverse Degree" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy.

TWC380by Ali Moradi

In this post, you'll find extremely concise and idiomatic code solutions written in Perl. Utilising the many powerful built-in list functions in Perl's List::Util module (e.g., max() and sum0()), as well as utilising clever array slicing to achieve succinctness, Ali has written very elegant and extremely efficient code that solves each of the two assigned problems in no more than just a few lines of code and makes use of the modules' built-in test coverage features.

Reverse Sumby Arne Sommer

An excellent, organised demonstration of Raku's unique language capabilities for Weekly Challenge #380. Author beautifully combines native features, including Bag data structures and state variables, by developing clear, practical solutions. In addition, Arne also provides thorough testing to validate the logic correctly.

Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 380by Jaldhar H. Vyas

This post presents a very interesting and informative comparison of Perl and Raku in regard to Weekly Challenge #380 by visually demonstrating some of the advanced features of the two programming languages, namely by using the (s///ger) operator as a frequency counter in the same manner in both Perl and Raku and providing an excellent example of how Perl's built in index function has recently improved, allowing for an easier way of indexing various items.

Reverse Frequenciesby Jorg Sommrey

The blog post does an amazing job of explaining weekly challenge #380 technically through comparing the two very different programming paradigms of Perl and J. The use of multi-dimensional hashes in Perl gives an aesthetically pleasing and simple way to organise information into categories, whereas the functional style of J provides a mathematically elegant solution for dealing with arrays and their indices, as well as character mapping.

The Weekly Challenge 380by Lubos Kolouch

In this article, solutions presented were derived by showing the strengths of each language by providing a clear and technical comparison of how Perl's regex-based string manipulation can be contrasted with the expressive nature of Python's list comprehensions and the built-in dictionary structures.

Perl Weekly Challenge 380by W Luis Mochan

W. Luis Mochán's innovation in reducing the complexity of frequency mapping, to succinct "1.5-liner" executable format as well as clever strategy on Task 1 all contribute to his demonstrated skills at successfully combining structural simplicity and robustness of execution presented via use of multiple try/catch validation blocks, to form an elite standard for executing Perl hacks.

Watch Your Zeros, and Don’t Get Off by One!by Matthias Muth

Matthias takes the opportunity to highlight edge cases, to demonstrate how to use case insensitive file name matching (using the fc function) instead of zero based indexing and loop multipliers, and to use an innovative way of adding a safety net around the injection of zeros to avoid producing undefined exceptions.

Just like honey, baby, from the beeby Packy Anderson

Packy gives a detailed and multilingual look at Weekly Challenge #380 with his solutions in Raku, Perl, Python and Elixir. His use of "bag" data structures in all four languages shows how the same underlying frequency logic is implemented across those four languages, and also provides important technical details about special edge case code requirements for Raku, such as preventing -Inf math results.

Frequencies and degreesby Peter Campbell Smith

Peter utilising natively fast ASCII byte operations and provides a very elegant and performance-based method to solving weekly challenge. With the help of integer array indices created through the ord() function instead of performing heavier hash lookups, Peter produces an outstandingly fast frequency counter.

Reverse the Frequency, Kennethby Roger Bell West

The post demonstrates the use of both idiomatic Perl and a clever implementation of it in PostScript. Roger's ability to transfer algorithmic logic between these two very different styles of programming (high level hashes for frequency counting in perl, to low level stack manipulations and dictionary management for postscript) shows great creativity, as well as the experience to structurally solve programming problems.

The race car has rhythmby Simon Green

In the post, Simon has shown how the multiple paradigms can be assimilated into one cohesive framework of the same operational flow; ie. Using Python's high-level native collection's Counter module, one can progress in a relatively seamless manner all the way down to Perl's low-level core tools using split and explicit hash manipulation techniques.

Rakudo

2026.26 Release #194by Elizabeth Mattijsen

Weekly collections

NICEPERL's listsby Miguel Prz

Great CPAN modules released last week;
MetaCPAN weekly report.

Events

Perl development using AI (online)July 8, 2026

Paris.pm monthly meetingJuly 8, 2026

Purdue Perl Mongers (HackLafayette) - TBAJuly 8, 2026

Boston Perl Mongers virtual monthlyJuly 14, 2026

You joined the Perl Weekly to get weekly e-mails about the Perl programming language and related topics.

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Perl 🐪 Weekly #779 - LinkedIn and the Perl Weekly

Gábor Szabó — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 07:39:29 +0000

Originally published at Perl Weekly 779

Hi there!

In the 15 years since the Perl Weekly was first published we included posts from more than 800 authors. For 114 of them we have their LinkedIn profile, for 264 we have their PAUSE id, and for 200 we have a picture. I would love to get your help finding more. You can see the full list of authors. The source is in the src/authors.json file in our repository. Please help us locate more information about our authors. Send a PR or send me an email with links to the profiles of the authors. (If you send PR send a separate one for each author. That will make it easier to accept them.)

To make the LinkedIn information more useful I've also update the templates of the Perl Weekly and in each issue we'll include the link to the LinkedIn profile of each author. If we have it on file.

Discussing posts on Reddit: Many of the Perl Weekly posts have appeared on Reddit and some have active discussion. I used to embed links to these discussions in the text of the entry, but now Reddit got a separate field in our data files. From now we can include a little Reddit logo next to each entry linking to the respective Reddit post. I hope this will allow you to get involved in the discussion.

We had two excellent presentations at the Perl Maven online event last week. You can find the videos below. Make sure you 'like' them. You can register to the next event.

Finally, if you'd like to join our WhatsApp or Telegram chat group about Perl, contact me via the respective platform and I'll add you to the channel.

Enjoy your week!

--
Your editor: Gabor Szabo.

Announcements

PAGI Distribution split on CPAN by John Napiorkowski

The news: PAGI is now three CPAN distributions instead of one. PAGI-Server — the reference server; PAGI-Tools — the application toolkit; PAGI — the specification;

ANNOUNCE: Perl.Wiki V 1.49, etcby Ron Savage

Articles

Perl PAGI Middlewareby John Napiorkowski

A port of the sample app from What Is Middleware? - which builds the same three-layer stack in Plack/PSGI (Perl) and Starlette/ASGI (Python) - to PAGI, an async, ASGI-style application interface for Perl.

What Was Matt Thinking? The high schooler who developed everyone’s forums and guestbooks in 1996 didn’t really think about security when he was building all that software. But Matt’s Script Archive was more than exploits.

GTC 2.20 Pro designerby Herbert Breunung

GTC 2.20 brings a huge amount of new features again (described in this post) and is starting an additional, more trimmed down, high level API, geared more toward what designers expect. But it also comes with new documentation and error handling, the two most important things that were missing for a professional distribution.

Choosing the Right Database Abstraction by Dave Cross

Dave writes: 'A question came up recently in the Perl community asking whether, in a Mojolicious application, it’s better to use DBIx::Class or a Mojolicious-specific module like Mojo::Pg. It's an interesting question, but I think it's asking the wrong thing.'

DBIx::QuickORM - Alternative to DBIx::Class/DBIO by Chad Granum

Chad writes: 'This weekend at the perl and raku conference I did a presentation on how to move forward from the current state of DBIx::Class and its lack of new development. We discussed several options including an alternative I have been writing. I have never liked DBIx::Class, so I tried to write something that felt more intuitive to how my brain works. It was suggested that I post it here.'

Introducing constant::string and constant::string::ucby James Wright

James writes: 'If you're like me, you use a constant a lot (I may overuse it). I often use it to turn typos in words and fields into compile-time errors, and for that I usually create constants that either are the named the same as the word, or the word uppercased.'

Discussion

Introducing HTML::Composer and general musings about Perl HTML templating by Rawley Fowler

Rawley writes: 'Perl has some great templating libraries for HTML. Most of them are pretty fast, and do what you want. However, they all share a common "problem", they make me write HTML. I'm a Perl developer, I like writing Perl, I want to write Perl, so when I have to switch contexts to HTML it annoys me.' HTML::Composer is the answer.

DBIO - A DBIx::Class replacement by brian d foy

DBIO - Native relational mapping for Perl, built on DBI

Videos

Perl development using Ollama and local models Claude and VS Codeby Dmytro Lyakh

The recordings from the recent online Perl Maven session

Improving ptkdb, the graphical debugger of Perl using ChatGPTby Matthew Persico

The recordings from the recent online Perl Maven session

Perl

This week in PSC (230) | 2026-06-22

The Weekly Challenge

The Weekly Challenge - 380by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Sum of Frequencies" and "Reverse Degree". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ.

RECAP - The Weekly Challenge - 379by Mohammad Sajid Anwar

Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Reverse String" and "Armstrong Number" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy.

TWC379by Ali Moradi

The Blog Post by Ali provides a highly efficient and minimalist way of coding in Perl by offering solutions to the problem set of The Weekly Challenge #379. Ali uses a brilliant chop loop to reverse a string and a concisely written higher-order grep block to determine Armstrong numbers in the given base. This shows that Perl can be written very compactly but also in an extremely expressive manner.

Armstring or Strongby Arne Sommer

Arne has given us a great example of Raku's toolkit through the Weekly Challenge 379. He uses many of the Raku methods (comb, pop, base, etc.) to write very concise and effective code for both reversing a string and finding base-specific Armstrong numbers. If you want your Raku skillset to grow in terms of both abilities and syntax style, you should definitely read this.

Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 379by Jaldhar H. Vyas

This post does an excellent job of illustrating how the relationship between Perl and Raku has changed over time, and uses that to illustrate how these two languages handle identical logic with different syntaxes. It uses examples of how Perl uses the classic, reliable Perl syntax and how Raku provides its own modern, built-in methods of extracting a digit from a number with the modern feature of converting between bases instead.

There Is More Than One Way To Powerby Jorg Sommrey

This article contains a clear, consistent format outlining all parts of the challenge as well showing ingenuity in using both the Perl and J languages. The examples of different ways to reverse a string with both in-place reversal and use of PDL slicing techniques, along with the compact implementation of variable-base Armstrong numbers using a functional programming paradigm, highlight the insights and education obtained by polyglot developers from this article.

The Weekly Challenge 379by Lubos Kolouch

Lubos writing style contains excellent quality, idiomatic code and brief, easily-understood explanations of the different ways to break down difficult logical or enough to solve complicated mathematical problems, so they are accessible to all (even to those with no programming experience).

Perl Weekly Challenge 379by W Luis Mochan

W. Luis Mochan has demonstrated his expertise by providing concise code that uses very little coding space. He created very efficient single and double lines of code (Perl) for each of the weekly challenge entry solutions. The way he approached Armstrong Numbers with a dynamic array that uses rolling bases, rather than normal division to calculate base conversion points, is astoundingly creative, instructional and well documented.

Just Do It Yourself!by Matthias Muth

The professional quality of Matthias's solution to the Perl Weekly Challenge is evidenced by the exceptional level of detail. Clearly, the README describes both the underlying logic as well as the algorithms used. The actual code is very idiomatic, clean and well-structured. This represents an excellent example of good software engineering practices and is a great resource for the community to learn from.

I see strings reversed… sum numbers, too…by Packy Anderson

Packy provides some ways to think about how to tackle the Perl Weekly Challenge. His approach is well-organised and very interesting. What stands out most is how much time he spends comparing Perl, Raku, Python and Elixir implementations to help the reader understand their differences. The way he explains each solution with examples is very effective, and it provides an excellent way for programmers looking to improve their skills with strings and scripts.

Reversing and curious numbersby Peter Campbell Smith

Peter puts a high value on creating code that uses clear, easy-to-read, well-maintained, and easy-to-write code rather than using complicated, convoluted, and multifaceted configurations. This makes the blog post very accessible to all levels of developers. It contains additional detail, educational material, and information in the public domain that should be of use to the developer community. There are also multiple edge cases addressed in this blog, and a comprehensive analysis of the data will make it very easy for the reader to follow through the examples provided.

Reverse Armstrongby Roger Bell West

This blog covers Perl Weekly Challenge 379's solutions for string manipulation and narcissistic numbers in several different languages. Here, Roger, compares implementations of the same problem in Perl, Lua, PostScript, and Rust, illustrating how they each offer different approaches to performance optimisation and memory allocation. Overall, this approach allows him to provide great practical insight to readers on how the languages differ in these two areas.

Work itby Simon Green

This post presents an extremely entertaining and informative dual-language analysis of Weekly Challenge #379, as well as an entertainingly framed musical presentation. In addition, the juxtaposition of the neatness of the Python loop construct with the traditional method of manipulating strings in Perl helps provide clear, easy-to-follow solutions to challenging technical questions, particularly when dealing with the conversion of multiple digit bases for Armstrong Numbers.

Weekly collections

NICEPERL's listsby Miguel Prz

Great CPAN modules released last week.

Events

Perl development using AI (online)July 8, 2026

Paris.pm monthly meetingJuly 8, 2026

Purdue Perl Mongers (HackLafayette) - TBAJuly 8, 2026

Boston Perl Mongers virtual monthlyJuly 14, 2026

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Perl 🐪 Weekly #777 - Check your CPAN profile!

Gábor Szabó — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:26:09 +0000

Originally published at Perl Weekly 777

Hi there!

In the recent weeks I looked at a lot of MetaCPAN profiles (aka. author pages) such as that of MANWAR. If I could also find their LinkedIn profile I invited them to connect via LinkedIn. (If I have not sent you an invitation yet, then I guess I missed your profile. I'd be glad to get a connect request via LinkedIn.)

I noticed that a large percentage of the people still have their @cpan.org email address listed. Despite the fact that cpan.org email forwarding has been shut down 6 weeks ago. That means people will get annoyed if hey try to contact you using that address.

You could replace that address or hide it and offer other ways for people to contact you. Either of them is better than having a bad address.

In addition, I noticed that some of the links people have there are not working. (e.g. incorrect link to their LinkedIn profile, or to their home page etc.)

In order to fix these you probably first need to check and update your PAUSE account. After logging in look for the Edit Account Info menu option. There you can list your email address and you can even decide if you'd like to have a visible address or not.

Then you could take a look at your MetaCPAN profile. For this visit MetaCPAN. Login in the top-right corner. If you don't remember whether you used GitHub or Google, don't worry. Inside you can connect them in the Identities menu point. Then go to the Profile menu point and update the fields there.

Finally, if you have updated your profile after reading this, I'd be glad if you sent me an email so I'll know this messaged had some positive impact.

Oh, and if you don't have a CPAN account and you have not uploaded anything yet, then what are you waiting for?

Enjoy your week!

--
Your editor: Gabor Szabo.

Articles

Time::Str - Time Zones and Leap Seconds

Time::Str parses and formats date/time strings across 20+ standard formats, with an optional C/XS backend and nanosecond precision. The previous post, Introducing Time::Str, covered parsing and formatting. This one covers two additions, time zones and leap seconds, and ends with a note on the new C parsers. (Reddit)

Discussion

Confused about a few parts of the new Core OOP

Memory sharing between scripts

First record in implicit -n loop behaves differently than the rest. Hoping to find an explanation.

Grants

PEVANS Core Perl 5: Grant Report for May 2026

Perl

This week in PSC (228) | 2026-06-08

The Weekly Challenge

The Weekly Challenge - 378

Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Second Largest Digit" and "Sum of Words". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ.

RECAP - The Weekly Challenge - 377

Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Reverse Existence" and "Prefix Suffix" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy.

Prefixed Existence

This article offers a great introduction to the Raku language through its implementation of the The Weekly Challenge #377, specifically the use of native Raku functions, such as .flip and .combinations. The code is well-written, typical of Raku, and fully supported with an extensive breakdown of each line of code, detailed run-time logs, and references to helpful documentation.

Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 377

The article compares Perl and Raku solutions for Week 376 of the Challenge and illustrates how the two languages are different in terms of their evolution. Specifically, it illustrates how Raku provides a more modern set of high-level features (e.g., built-in support for substrings and pairs) compared to the equivalent structural features in Perl, which require additional code to implement.

From Start to End and Back

Jorg takes a multi-paradigm approach to solving The Weekly Challenge #377 in both Perl and J (the array-processing language). This article showcases Jorg's technical knowledge because he generalises the first task from its minimum definition and well-organises the second task's input by length to optimise the process. Additionally, Jorg's complete walkthrough of the functional, tacit programming techniques found in language J is well presented, allowing for the easy comprehension of complex manipulations of Arrays and RegEx optimisations.

Perl Weekly Challenge 377

W. Luis Mochan employs the expressive capabilities of the Perl language in order to create solutions that exhibit exceptional brevity with no extra syntax or words. This will definitely capture the interest of developers looking for clean and functional solutions.

They run and hide their heads / They might as well be dead…

This post provides a great, multi-lingual breakdown of the challenge with clean idiomatic solutions in Perl, Raku, Python and Elixir. By demonstrating how each of the programming paradigms handle the same logic, Packy provides educational value beyond measure while maintaining interest with a clever Beatles-style music theme.

Strings within strings

Peter offers a refreshingly simple and useful way to accomplish this task using only Perl. He places an emphasis on keeping the code readable, ensuring UTF-8 characters can safely contain more than one byte, and maintaining a high level of performance in real-world applications. There is no ambiguity or sacrifice made in developing an easy-to-interpret solution to a hard problem and accommodating corner cases.

The Weekly Challenge - 377: Reverse Existence

In this article, Reinier discusses how to efficiently leverage Perl's string manipulation and logical checks to confirm if input strings share overlapping character sequences with the least amount of code. This article is an excellent resource for learning to write perl code that efficiently performs substring matching in a clear, idiomatic manner with minimal additional complexity.

The Weekly Challenge - 377: Prefix Suffix

Reinier made use of Perl's built-in string matching capabilities to efficiently find all pairs where one of the strings serves as both the beginning and end of one of the other strings. This showcases a great example of writing efficient, clear code to solve a complex logic problem of substring containment in as little code as possible.

A Suffix to Existence

Roger's article provides an excellent comparison between different programming languages by demonstrating how language paradigms solve the same algorithms for sliding windows and substring matches, thereby providing significant educational value to the reader by making comparisons between high-level built-in functions with manual implementations for the same problem.

Existence

In this post, Simon analysed the issue into smaller pieces/steps made it easier for implementation to remain very readable and maintainable. A strong resource for developers wishing to observe how simple, idiomatic methods can more elegantly achieve string manipulating constraints.

Weekly collections

NICEPERL's lists

Great CPAN modules released last week.

Events

Perl development using AI (online)

June 17, 2026

Berlin.pm - Naumanns Biergarten

June 24, 2026

Toronto.pm - June Social Evening

June 25, 2026

The Perl and Raku Conference 2026

June 26-29, 2026, Greenville, SC, USA

Paris.pm monthly meeting

July 8, 2026

Purdue Perl Mongers (HackLafayette) - TBA

July 08, 2026

Boston Perl Mongers virtual monthly

July 14, 2026

You joined the Perl Weekly to get weekly e-mails about the Perl programming language and related topics.

Want to see more? See the archives of all the issues.

Not yet subscribed to the newsletter? Join us free of charge!

Perl 🐪 Weekly #776 - Learning Perl

Gábor Szabó — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:13:39 +0000

Originally published at Perl Weekly 776

Hi there,

Recently, I came across an article, The Day I Decided Never to Learn Python by Randal L. Schwartz. Well, Randal doesn't need an introduction. He took us back to 2001, the same era when I first started learning Perl in 1999. He was a major guiding force during my early programming days.

Last week, I joined a live session by Gabor focussed on FalkorDB. It was fun watching him code and talk while I sat back as a silent spectator. You can learn a lot just by watching how he approaches coding. It reminded me of many years ago when I did pair programming with him and submitted a pull request to the Dancer2 project. Those were the golden days, when I had so much energy and time. That being said, I am still actively learning Perl and discovering how to do new things with it. These concepts may not be new to everyone, but they are new to me. For example, I recently played with GraphQL for the first time, and I've also been experimenting with RAG and JSON-RPC. I have shared my recent experiments down below.

The process of learning never stops. A few days ago, I noticed an update for HTTP::Message v7.02. Since it was released by Olaf Alders, I was curious to see what had changed. It turned to be something, I hadn't realised for all these years. While I am well-acquainted with HTTP methods like GET, POST, and PUT, I didn't know "0" could actually be a valid HTTP method name if you wanted it to be. This release added support for exactly that, thanks to contributor, Karen Etheridge. Amidst all of this, I am still trying to find time for my upcoming book on DBIx::Class. I recently shared a blog post demonstrating the power of DBIC components, and I am trying my best not to lose focus.

You might find that this edition is full of my own personal posts, as there was unfortunately very little community news to report this week. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the rest of the newsletter.

--
Your editor: Mohammad Sajid Anwar.

Announcements

This week in PSC (227) | 2026-06-01

This week we were back to full strength. We have now dealt with all of the belated issues and all of the blockers. Paul will be shipping 5.43.11 very shortly. With the amount of changes we have had to merge, we will not be able to rush the .11 cycle, but we intend to start the work on the 5.44 RC early, to ensure that we can release with as little additional delay as possible.

Articles

Result Class - Components

Continue with the series post on DBIx::Class, in this post I am showing the power of DBIC components dealing with date/timestamp column.

RAG with Perl

In this post, I try to decode what RAG is and how we can implement RAG engine in Perl talking to LLM and Vector database in a docker container.

CPAN Debian Package

First time managed to build a debian package for DBIx::Class::Async with step by step instructions.

JSON-RPC with Perl

After dealing with gRPC, next in line was JSON-RPC. The motivation was to explore MCP after getting to know JSON-RPC. It turned out to be too easy demonstrate.

Mojo meets GraphQL

The post is meant for beginners as I am exploring GraphQL for the first time as well. The best part is the use of GraphiQL for building and testing the API.

DBIx::Class and GraphQL

In this post, I shared how to integrate DBIx::Class with GraphQL. Having played with GraphQL, I can say it is not for weak heart. If you are coming from REST API background then it will take some time to get your head around it. I am telling this from my personal exprience.

CPAN and GraphQL

After DBIx::Class integration with GraphQL, my immediate task was to make the process easy as it doesn't have to this complicated. In the process, I released brand new CPAN distribution: DBIx::Class::Schema::GraphQL.

CPAN

FalkorDB

Perl client module for FalkorDB. This code was mostly generated using AI tools and has not been checked manually yet.

DBIx::Class::Schema::GraphQL

It was created while working on the DBIx::Class integration with GraphQL. Using this module, it is so easy to build GraphQL API.

Grants

Maintaining Perl (Tony Cook) May 2026

Maintaining Perl 5 Core (Dave Mitchell): May 2026

The Weekly Challenge

The Weekly Challenge - 377

Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Reverse Existence" and "Prefix Suffix". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ.

RECAP - The Weekly Challenge - 376

Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Chessboard Squares" and "Doubled Words" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy.

Doubled Chessboard

The post offers an orderly, aesthetically pleasing way of solving the Weekly Challenge problems using the modern-day features of Raku syntax. With the use of well-defined subset custom types to strongly validate input and a simple, tokenising object-oriented class structure for text processing, Arne creates a solution that is easy to read and maintain and takes care of the complex edge cases such as applying a look behind that crosses over multiple lines.

Doubled Words

Bob presents a creative solution to a challenging text processing issue by using a well known yet little used built-in feature of the Perl. The result is an elegant mechanism for bypassing tokens through a clearly documented and separated mechanism of backtracking while retaining context about the structure through the use of captured groups in the split regex.

Chess Solo

Jorg provides a very concise and mathematically elegant solution for the colorisation of a chessboard. By recognising that under mod 2 operations the coordinate bases are completely annihilated, implementations can be created in both Perl and J using only one line of code and they are both efficient and structurally minimalist.

The Weekly Challenge 376

An unusually clear yet detailed solution is provided in this blog post, as it combines clean, idiomatic code examples with short technical explanations about how to use regex to parse doubled words and how to compare two mathematical coordinates. Complex logic is presented so anyone can read easily and learn from.

Perl Weekly Challenge 376

The excellent demonstration of the capabilities of Perl as a function-based programming language is shown through this post with extremely short and idiomatic solutions. Luis Mochán has used expressive, single-line statements to convert complicated constraints into small, clean, logical data flows in an extraordinary manner with Perl.

A 1-Bit Chessboard and Fancy Separators

Matthias presents an analytical and well-defined solution to the difficulties presented by Challenge 376 through the use of well-separated parsing and formatting, clear comments on the use of regular expressions, and the submission of a clear and clean solution suitable for production.

You might think I’m crazy, but I don’t even care

A well-structured and very interesting review of Perl Weekly Challenge 376 is presented with a reference to principles from a popular culture item. Packy clearly illustrates the elegant way to process text in the real world while exhibiting outstanding technical expertise by explaining the complexity of lookahead logic and the constraints of the boundary in a way that allows for simple, idiomatic, and highly maintainable solutions.

Squares and pairs

This solution offers a very neat, simple, and mathematically pleasing method for solving the chessboard parity problem. Peter has effectively utilised the ASCII values (ord) of the column letters as well as the numeric row values to reduce a spatial coordinate problem to a quick and efficient calculation of a bitwise parity (& 1). The source code is formatted well, clearly commented, and takes advantage of the mathematics behind the solution so as to avoid unnecessary conditional barriers.

The Weekly Challenge - 376: Chessboard Squares

This post gives a very clear, well-organized, and visually intuitive representation of how to solve the programming challenge "Chessboard Squares". Explicitly laying out the grid coordinates with their appropriate color will provide an excellent foundation for developing an accurate and efficient lookup algorithm.

The Weekly Challenge #376

By using an elegant mathematical approach to the parity of squares on a chessboard, along with an incredibly efficient, single-pass regular expression, this code shows immense technical skill. The code also uses multi-line lookaheads, HTML tags, and back references, all handled by a simple subroutine (double_double_toil_and_trouble), that is suitable for use at production level.

Half a Chessboard

A general description of a previously completed task, this post shows a real-life application of code reuse. Roger created a nice, modular solution to decode coordinate mathematics (on the basis of (x+y) mod 2) by cleanly wrapping the existing helper function from the previous task. Therefore, through this implementation, he provides a concise representation of the solution and eliminates any duplicate logic.

Double chessboard

In this blog post, Simon's clever use of the bitwise XOR operator (^) as a parity check for a chess board is very creative. Additionally, he shows a well-organised and simple method of utilising re.split and list comprehensions to find the position of words while also overcoming some challenging lookahead and HTML boundary situations.

Rakudo

2026.22 Some AST Fruit

Weekly collections

NICEPERL's lists

Great CPAN modules released last week.

The corner of Gabor

A couple of entries sneaked in by Gabor.

Want to see more? See the archives of all the issues.

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