Hello, Perl fans. This is the bi-weekly Perl Newsletter, a mailing sent out every other Friday (give or take) to keep you informed as to the latest news and opinions from the world of Perl.

Ready? Go!

* Perl News

Choose the Right Tempate System for Your Team
Are you getting tired of using print to display all of the output from your program? Instead of updating the code every time the formatting changes, use a templating system! Okay, you all know this. You're all smart people. Yet even us smarties sometimes have too much work to do to figure out which of a dozen CPAN distributions is the right one. Vince Veselosky wrote a nice exploration of various templating systems available for Perl.

Choosing a Templating System
Don't forget that Perrin Harkins has a great comparison as well.

YAPC::NA
YAPC::NA is back in Chicago this summer (here's hoping for Vancouver, BC next year!). The organizers are way ahead of themselves and have already put up the conference web site.

Strawberry Perl
Adam Kennedy is just one of the people behind Strawberry Perl (David Golden deserves a lot of credit too). Adam wrote up some thoughts on the future of the out-of-the-box distribution for Windows users.

Why Perl 6 Scares Me
Adam also brought up his concerns about the available tools for Perl 6. Even though the language is still in development, it's not too early to consider editor support, syntax highlighting, and code analysis tools.

Implementing Perl 6
One of the nice new features available in Rakudo Perl (you know, Perl 6 running on Parrot) is support for OO programming, especially declaring classes with methods and attributes. Jonathan Worthington explained how he added them.

49k Should Be Enough for Anyone
Your editor and Andy Lester tracked down and fixed some memory leaks in Rakudo and Parrot and explained how. You can join the fun.

Weekly Perl 5 Porters Updates
David Landgren summarized the activities on Perl 5 Porters.
Week of January 13-19
Week of January 20-26

Perl 6 Design Meetings
Your editor minuted the Perl 6 design meetings:
January 25 Meeting
January 31 Meeting

* Perl at O'Reilly

O'Reilly has announced the call for submissions for OSCON and The Perl Conference this summer in lovely Portland, Oregon. They're due at midnight on February 4, 2008. Get them in; don't rely on being able to sweet-talk the conference organizer. (She will take bribes of fruit flavored candy with lots of sugar, video games, an XO, an EeePC, and a couple of those EeeTV models, if you're curious.)

How to Tell Your Perl Story at OSCON
brian d foy's advice from the most recent Perl Newsletter is still timeless.

Download Latest Version of Perl
In other news, the CPAN gurus revised their explanation of why you can download Perl 5.10.0, Perl 5.9.5, Perl 5.8.8, and Perl 5.6.2. Perl.com's download page has undergone similar modifications. Is this easier to use and understand for people who don't read or delete the several hundred messages per week on p5p? Feedback welcome.

Four Quadrants of Platform Support
Your editor agreed with an essay from KDE hacker Adriaan de Groot on supporting minority platforms with free software (and begged for help for Parrot and Perl 6 efforts).

Scale(1), Scale(2), ... Scale(n)
... and wondered if the definition of "scalability" has more facets than commonly acknowledged.

Feral Patent Threatens One Hundred Million Computers Protected by ClamAV
Andy Oram bashed the feral patent that threatens virus and potentially spam scanning on mail servers.

MTOS Stable Released
Timothy Appnel approved of the first F/OSS release of Movable Type.

Reading Code Versus Understanding a Language
Curtis Poe discussed the difference between reading code and understanding a language.

Your editor glares at Jonathan Scott Duff for not getting his article in on time. Poke him with a stick if you see him (but gently; he still has to be able to type).

Now off to investigate yet another segfault,

- c
chromatic
Editor, Perl.com, et al