Perl 7: An Opinionated Introduction

Jim Keenan from NY.pm group. Introduced himself wearing the 2007 NA (Houston) t-shirt. He specifically asked that the meeting not be recorded. He made the argument that the talk really should be in the moment and not live forever.

Jim talked about the history of Perl development, including covering the Era of the Pumpking. Basically, one person as a release manager, driving to the next version release.

Jim then covered a new movement to develop a Perl 7 version. Perl 7 would contain all of the features of Perl 5.32, but would give us a place to break backwards compatibility. In particular, we would be able to change the Perl default behavior, for example

* strict and warnings by default
* bring in most of the optional features from the last 12 years

Importantly, having a Perl 7 means there will be a Perl 8. This means that we can deprecate behavior that does not match where the community wants to go with Perl.

The Perl 7 repo is available on Github. Email jkeenan at pobox.com to get started with the volunteer process.

We had 20 people attending the remote meeting on Zoom this month.