by Mark Keating

Europe is still freezing but Google and Mark Keating are already thinking about the summer and the code. The Perl Foundation wants to participate again which means you need to give ideas and volunteer as mentor.

by Gabor Szabo (SZABGAB)

This is the second DWIM release in a week. The first one was using Perl 5.12 but this one already uses the latest version of Perl and includes more than 400 modules from CPAN.

by Reini Urban (RURBAN)

I think this is not the first time we catch Reini Urban eliminating bloat from our perl scripts.

by Neil Bowers (NEILB)

Neil Bowers is linking to the updated version of his report about defining constants. I really love the comparisons Neil is doing. I am looking forward to the day when his reports will be somehow available on the search interfaces of CPAN. E.g. when a module that he lists is being displayed there could be a link to his article.

The announcement about the new version of PDL made it into The H.

by Sawyer X (XSAWYERX)

Sawyer X is, understandably, very enthusiastic about the community around the Dancer project and he also lists a number of changes that went into Dancer in the last 2 weeks. If you'd like to have the warm feeling of being in an open source community, this is for you.

chromatic makes a good point about automating parts of packaging CPAN modules or anything really.

by Laurent Dami (DAMI)

Laurent Dami (dami) started to prepare for the next Plat-forms competition that will take place in April in Berlin, but he is worried. Will the apparent lack of Perl on AWS make it hard for the Perl team to compete? Is there a lack of Perl on AWS? What do you think?

Peter Shangov describes how some languages (Java, C#, Python, Perl 5 and Perl 6) handle meta-data on objects and then offers some suggestion how he would like to write meta-data declarations in Perl 5.

by Curtis 'Ovid' Poe (OVID)

Do you allow strange characters in the username field? What about the password field? Don't have people enough problem typing with Caps-lock on by mistake? Check some of the issues with Unicode and passwords as Curtis (Ovid) Poe thinks about them.

by Barbie (BARBIE)

CPAN Testers is unique in its size and all that depends on a very small number of people. Mostly on Barbie, who wrote this monthly report.

chromatic shows a small example on the awesomeness of Chart::Clicker. I also like the module but I think last time I checked, I could not install it on Windows. I'll have to check that again and try to figure out what might be the problem so I can include it in DWIM Perl.

by Mark Allen (MALLEN)

Mark Allen shared his slides from the talk he gave at Houston.pm. Very nice slides and I love the title too. I am sorry we don't have the actual presentation. Maybe at YAPC::NA?

by Moritz Lenz (MORITZ)

Moritz Lenz writes: The second task from the Perl 6 Coding Contest 2011 needs data structures not available in core Perl 6 to be solved efficiently.

by Jonathan Worthington (JONATHAN)

by Jonathan Worthington

by Moritz Lenz (MORITZ)

Moritz Lenz invites us to another Perl 6 challenge. This time he describes the well known dilemma, offers some strategies, and provides the check-sum of his solution. It's like putting the solution in an envelop in a trusted third party. Very nice idea.

by David Golden (DAGOLDEN)

David Golden submitted a grant proposal. I think it would be important to get comments from more people.

If you are like me, who would like to read the Hacker News of Ycombinator but does not have the time to follow it, the newsletter of Kale Davis might help you keep an eye on the most important postings.

Ember Crooks tells her story, why she learned Perl and how Perl was chosen in the DB2 team in IBM.

by Damian Conway (DCONWAY)

Ian Norton mentioned the training Damian will give on 16 April 2012 in London.

by Gabor Szabo (SZABGAB)

I have been planning to publish my Perl training materials along with the newly written Perl set of articles. This is the first one with the Beginner Perl Maven material.

by Gabor Szabo (SZABGAB)

IMHO for beginners it's quite hard to find explanation on what are the special variables of Perl. Especially $_ is confusing people and search engines. I hope my little contribution helps.

by Gabor Szabo (SZABGAB)

People coming from other programming languages often have trouble with the automatic string to number conversion in Perl. The comments also mention a couple of strange cases.

February 28, 2012, Ramat Gan, Israel

March 5-7, 2012, Erlangen, Germany

April 14, 2012, Catonsville, MD, USA

April 14, 2012,