Lately, the Perl language has had less buzz surrounding it than many other languages and development environments, but Perl is still a key component on the Internet.

"It is with great pleasure that The Perl Foundation and Mozilla Foundation announce a major new Perl 6 Development Grant. The recipient of the grant is Patrick Michaud, the Perl 6 compiler pumpking and lead programmer of a Perl 6 implementation based on Parrot and on his own work on the Perl 6 compiler and grammar..."

Perl's 21st anniversary of release is next Thursday, 18 December. Perl 5 is already 14 years old. Though the language has seen many changes since 1994, it can't stand still. Perl 5.10 added many wonderful features and Perl 6 will change the landscape for programming languages, but what's the vision for Perl 5? How can the language stay relevant?

After two years of development by over two hundred authors and committers the Perl developers have released Perl 5.12.0, the latest version of the Perl language,

"Moritz Lenz has started a series of blog posts about moving from Perl 5 to Perl 6, including why some design choices were made, and how you can take advantage of some of the Perl 6 features today in Perl 5..."

Nicholas Clark has been funded by the Perl Foundation to work on improving the Perl 5 Core. The term of the work is coming to an end and Clark is now seeking another $20,000 to continue the work. The Foundation is consulting with the community before making the final decision whether to go ahead with the extension which would see Clark devoting another 400 hours of dedicated work to the project.

"...Perl 6 is a rewrite of the Perl language. It will feel Perly, and yet become more modern as it pulls in influences from languages like Ruby and Haskell.

Technically, Perl 6 is just a language specification, and there are at least two implementations underway..."

"Perl 1 was released to the public by Larry Wall 20 years ago today. To celebrate, Perl5Porters have released Perl5.10, the latest stable version of Perl 5. Happy Birthday Perl! ..."

"...I'd really like to deploy a customer relationship management (CRM) package to allow us to better track our relationships with our donors, big and small. I was a bit surprised to turn up next to nothing when I typed "perl CRM" into Google..." -- via perl-buzz