Perl 🐪 Weekly #734 – CPAN Day

August 18, 2025

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Gábor Szabó

Originally published at Perl Weekly 734

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.

—
Your editor: Mohammad Sajid Anwar.

Announcements

PCC Videos Now Being Released

The 2024 Perl Community Conference videos are being sent out now.

Articles

Python Surges in Popularity. And So Does Perl

Perl takes a big jump in TIOBE’s Programming Community Index.

Kaiju Boss Battle: A Dist::Zilla Journey from Chaos to Co-Op

Interesting take on Dist::Zilla along with few other alternatives.

CPAN

Benchmark::MCE on CPAN

A new entry to CPAN to benchmark MCE performance.

Grants

Maintaining Perl (Tony Cook) July 2025

Maintaining Perl 5 Core (Dave Mitchell): July 2025

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.

The Weekly Challenge – 335

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.

RECAP – The Weekly Challenge – 334

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.

TWC334

Solutions offer concise, idiomatic and correct approaches—particularly suited for quick code golfing or engineering katas.

Point Range

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.

First We Do the Range Sum, Then We Take Manhattan

Solutions shine with clarity and comprehensiveness. They’re practical yet polished, offering solid templates for real-world scenarios.

Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 334

Solutions are elegant and concise, showcasing strong use of Perl and Raku idioms.

Sice and Dice

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.

Perl Weekly Challenge 334

Very strong use of PDL to vectorize operations with robust error handling in both tasks.

Perl Slices Make a Valid Point

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.

SUMone tell me what makes a point VALID?

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.

A slice of New York

Both solutions are written in readable, beginner-friendly style with comments and example calls.

The Weekly Challenge #334

Both solutions are beginner-friendly with POD documentation, examples and clear subroutines.

Appreciate the straightforwardness of the task, emphasizing that the availability of array slicing and summing functions in most languages makes it a one-liner solution as shown using Crystal and Scala.

Perl has classes now

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.