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Issue #734 - 2025-08-18 - CPAN Day
latest | archive | edited by Mohammad Sajid Anwar
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Hi there, Last week, 16th August, we all celebrated the CPAN Day. It's a good time to step back and appreciate how resilient Perl has been in the pantheon of programming languages. The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) has anchored developer productivity for many decades with thousands of modules designed to elegantly and effortlessly solve problems, both great and small. CPAN Day doesn't just celebrate code, it celebrates the collaborative, creative nature of the open source environment fueled by a community that supports Perl's continued viability. Perl's accomplishments don't begin and end with the CPAN archives. Recent changes marked in the TIOBE Programming Language Index signify something exciting. Perl is rising up the list. Perl is seeing new interest and activity metrics that make it clear: Perl is here to remind the technology space that flexibility, text-processing capabilities and the advantages of a mature ecosystem have immense value in 2025 and beyond. So why after so long are we seeing an uptick in interest? It may be that developers are recognising a growing need for tools for rapid prototyping, de-risked data manipulation and safe systems scripting. These areas are what Perl continues excel at. Furthermore, with best practices for modern Perl in place and the support of a continuously active community, Perl is likely showing people it's not a has-been but a different kind of choice for different kinds of problems. This CPAN Day, spend some time exploring a new module, contributing to an existing module or just enjoying the invention of other people which is on CPAN. I released patch to a long-standing encoding issue in Data::Money to celebrate the day. Please share how you celebrated the special day. Enjoy rest of the newsletter. Mohammad Sajid Anwar |
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Perl takes a big jump in TIOBE's Programming Community Index. |
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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 "Common Characters" and "Find Winner". 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 "Range Sum" and "Nearest Valid Point" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy. |
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by Ali Moradi Solutions offer concise, idiomatic and correct approaches—particularly suited for quick code golfing or engineering katas. |
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by Arne Sommer Solutions are technically sound, idiomatic and easy to follow. The use of Raku-specific features—like array ranges, where clauses, UInt, and sum—demonstrates fluency in the language and delivers concise yet powerful code. |
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by Bob Lied Solutions shine with clarity and comprehensiveness. They’re practical yet polished, offering solid templates for real-world scenarios. |
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by Jaldhar H. Vyas Solutions are elegant and concise, showcasing strong use of Perl and Raku idioms. |
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by Jorg Sommrey Both solutions are succinct, performant and leverage PDL’s strengths in vectorized computation. They’re a great demonstration of how Perl + PDL can resemble NumPy-style problem solving. |
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by W Luis Mochan Very strong use of PDL to vectorize operations with robust error handling in both tasks. |
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by Matthias Muth Solutions showcase modern Perl idioms, efficient data handling and clear problem decomposition, making the code both maintainable and performant. The approach reflects thoughtful design choices, leveraging CPAN modules and language features to minimize boilerplate without sacrificing readability. |
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by Packy Anderson (PACKY) Solutions are correct, clear and idiomatic. The code is well-commented and the verbose explanations are very helpful. Performance is fine for typical PWC input sizes. |
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by Peter Campbell Smith Both solutions are written in readable, beginner-friendly style with comments and example calls. |
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by Robbie Hatley Both solutions are beginner-friendly with POD documentation, examples and clear subroutines. |
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by Simon Green The post is well-organized, clearly separating the two tasks and showing both Python and Perl solutions side by side. This makes it easy to compare how the logic translates between languages. |
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