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Issue #727 - 2025-06-30 - Which versions of Perl do you use?
latest | archive | edited by Gabor Szabo
This edition was made possible by the supporters of our cause.
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Hi there! Recently I ran a poll asking which . I asked it both in the The Perl Community group on Facebook and in the Perl Maven community Telegram Channel and the Perl 5 Telegram group. There were 75 votes in the Facebook group: 1% use 5.42; 17% use 5.40; 30% use 5.38; 5% use 5.36; 29% use 5.22-5.34; 13% use 5.12-5.20; 5% use 5.10 or older. There were 29 votes in the Telegram group(s): 14% use 5.42; 31% use 5.40; 34% use 5.38; 7% use 5.36; 38% use 5.22-5.34; 17% use 5.12-5.20; 7% use 5.10 or older. Yes, people could select multiple answers. You can still go an vote in either of those polls. Many people commented that the use the version of perl that comes with the OS, to which Dave Cross posed Stop using your system Perl. I don't fully agree, but he has a point.
I don't recall what exactly prompted me to do this, but a few days ago I started to write a book about OOP - Object Oriented Perl. I took some of the slides I had for my advanced Perl course, started to update them and started to write explanations around the examples. As I write them I post the articles in the Perl Community group on Facebook and on my LinkedIn page. If you use Facebook I'd recommend you join that group and if you use LinkedIn I'd recommend you follow me. If you would like to connect with me on LinkedIn, please include a message saying that you are a reader of the Perl Weekly newsletter so I'll have some background. Besides publishing them on the social sites I also collect the writings about Perl OOP on my web site and I also started to publish the book on Leanpub.
As I am sure you know editing the Perl weekly, writing these examples and articles and book takes a lot of time that I should spend earning money by helping my clients with their Perl code-base. Luckily there are some people who support me financially via Patreon, GitHub. (Hint: it would be awesome if you'd also sponsor me with $10/month.) There are many people who like to get something 'tangible' to really justify their support. If you are such a person I created the Leanpub book especially for you. You can buy the Perl OOP book and some of my other books getting a pdf and an epub (for Kindle) version. You will both support my work and get a book. You will also get all the new versions of the book as I update it.
Enjoy your week! Gabor Szabo |
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Articles
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by Dave Cross (DAVECROSS) For years Dave has been telling us to use our own version of Perl and not to rely on the one that comes with our version of the Operating System. There is a lot of merit in what he is say and what he is writing in this article. I personally would go to the most extreme and use a Docker container for better separation and to make the development, testing, and production environments as similar as possible. With that said I am not 100% sold on the idea. I do understand the value in using the perl that comes with the OS and the perl modules that can be installed with the package-management system of the operating system. (e.g. apt/yum). See an extensive discussion on the topic. | 
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by Paul Cochrane (PTC) FIT files record the activities of people using devices such as sports watches and bike head units. |
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by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) There are all kinds of new and nice ways to write Perl code. Reading this article you'll learn about the new, experimental 'class' feature a bit more. | 
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by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) AWS DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service provided by AWS. |
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Discussion
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How do you manage the dependencies of a Perl module that depends on another perl module (distribution) developed in the same monorepo? |
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What happens when the same module is required both by your code and by one of your dependencies? Which version of that shared dependency will be installed? |
Jobs
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Just a few days ago I asked on our Telegram channel which companies use Perl for application development and now I see this post. Apparently there is a new web-site listing 'Perl jobs'. I don't know who is behind that site, but the background image has 'use strict' and 'use warnings' so it isn't that bad. |
Perl
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 Lance Wicks.
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by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Replace all ?" and "Good String". 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. |
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by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Missing Integers" and "MAD" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy. |
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by Adam Russell Taking advantage of Perl's hash lookup speed, O(1) time complexity. Keeps the implementation readable and concise. | 
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by Ali Moradi A compact, correct, and Perl-savvy solution sets. The post’s minimalist style reflects a strong grasp of both Perl idioms and the challenge requirements. |
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by Arne Sommer A well-structured, educational post that highlights the expressive power of Raku while staying true to challenge constraints. The inclusion of verbose output, clean modularity, and idiomatic constructs makes it an excellent read for both Raku learners and seasoned scripters. |
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by Jaldhar H. Vyas Offers elegant solutions in Raku and also provides working Perl equivalents. It balances code with commentary. |
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by Jorg Sommrey A technically sharp, creative post—especially with the use of PDL. |
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by W Luis Mochan Practical, ready-to-run code with clear explanation and includes both straightforward Perl and more advanced PDL solutions. |
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by Matthias Muth It provides concise and elegant solutions to both challenges with clear explanations of the reasoning behind them. The use of idiomatic Perl (e.g., map, grep, keys, and smart use of hashes) is idiomatic and effective. |
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by Packy Anderson (PACKY) It demonstrates good teaching style by explaining the problem, providing example inputs/outputs, and showing step-by-step approaches. The inclusion of multiple languages (Raku, Perl, Python, Elixir) is very valuable for readers interested in cross-language algorithm implementations. |
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by Peter Campbell Smith Both solutions are clean, efficient, and well-documented. It prioritises readability over one-liners—a good choice for maintainability. |
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by Robbie Hatley Using none to check if a number is missing is idiomatic and easy to read. Setting $"=', ' for array printing is a good touch. |
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by Roger Bell West (FIREDRAKE) Away week, still got Rust for us. As always, a detailed and descriptive approach makes the reading fun. |
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by Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes This post is a well-written, thoughtful exploration of two classic array problems, each solved elegantly in both Python and Perl, with a particular focus on bitarray usage and iteration techniques. |
Perl Tutorial
A section for newbies and for people who need some refreshing of their Perl knowledge. If you have questions or suggestions about the articles, let me know and I'll try to make the necessary changes. The included articles are from the Perl Maven Tutorial and are part of the Perl Maven eBook.
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