Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

As recently announced, the fifth Italian Perl Workshop will take place in Pisa (Italy) on October 22nd and 23rd. 120 people subscribed already, and more are expected by the first day of the Workshop. A full list of the accepted talks is available.

Two major Perl events will take place in Italy, thanks to the effort of the Italian Perl users and the Pisa.pm users group.

Here are the details!

The guys at Perl.it are at it again! The fourth Italian Perl Workshop is taking place next September in Pisa, Italy.

The best thing for a programming language is to be powerful and popular at the same time. Perl was like that some time ago, but over the years it has slowly lost its appeal, even while retaining and increasing its power. And Perl 6 has just come too late to save the day.

In the Debian project they refer to packages that no longer have mantainers as orphaned. I think it’s a good definition, and I’d extend it to free software packages that are no longer developed.

There are a lot of orphaned packages around, some actually deserve it but unfortunately there are also some that are promising or very good, and now they are almost dead. But, since we are talking about free software, every good developer is encouraged to pick one and try to push it a bit further

I’ve been programming in Perl for years - over ten now in fact - and I’ve written numerous books and articles on Perl and Perl programming. I’ve also worked with Python and written books and articles on Python programming, including a guide to migrating Perl applications to the Python language. For a while I really saw Python as an alternative to Perl, but after so many years and experience with Perl and what was possible with the language it is difficult to move on from the ‘Perl comfort zone’.