O'Reilly Open Source Convention - August 1-5, 2005

Session
What's New in Perl 5
Nicholas Clark, Fotango
Rafael Garcia-Suarez

Track: Perl
Date: Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005
Time: 11:35am - 12:20pm
Location: Portland 256
Two pumpkings for the price of one!

Perl 5.8.x marches on, stable, reliable, and boring as ever. Just what you need for a production environment. Hear Nicholas Clark, the maintenance pumpking, talk about the process behind "release early release often" which brings you the regular, reliable Perl maintenance releases. Learn about our near-miss nightmares, and how you can evade the the traps that nearly caught us. He'll describe what we do behind the scenes to keep life quiet for you, and how you might apply this yourself to improve your software.

Meanwhile there's a change of face for Perl 5.9.x, where Rafael Garcia-Suarez has taken over from Hugo van der Sanden as the development pumpking. He'll report on the state of 5.9, as we work towards the release of Perl 5.10. How could one improve on Perl 5.8? Well, let him whet your appetite for the next major version of Perl 5 with explanation of the exciting new features and how they will benefit your development. For example, user definable lexical pragmas to give you flexibility in your code, and relocatable Perl binaries to give you flexibility in your distribution. Ponder the savings in debugging as he demonstrates how Perl 5.9 can already do the "impossible," with the infamous "use of uninitialized value" warning augmented with the name the offending variable. Perl 5.10 will be good for you--come to this talk to learn why.