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

#perl #news #programming

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 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 - 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.