Dave Cross has posted Dotcom Survivor Syndrome – How Perl’s Early Success Created the Seeds of Its Downfall about current misconceptions about Perl and how those misconceptions came to be.

Can We Move On?

Dotcom Survivor Syndrome is real. So is Version Number Paralysis. Together, they’ve unfairly buried a language that remains fast, expressive, and battle-tested.

We can’t change the past. But we can:

• Acknowledge the emotional and historical baggage
• Celebrate the role Perl played in inventing the modern web
• Educate developers about what Perl really is today
• Push back against the assumption that old == obsolete

Certain vendors have certainly played the appeal to novelty fallacy to its outer limits to sell their own gimmicks while simultaneously maligning Perl. That'll take a lot to overcome, but is doable.

Yes, it's December again which means that it is time for the Perl Advent Calendar.

It is not too late to contribute to the calendar as they do not yet have 24 articles ready to go and are soliciting entries via the github repo. If there is a favourite module you think the world should know about or some insight you have gained from a particular project now would be a good time to write it up and submit it.

Happy Advent!

Trickster is a modern, lightweight Perl web framework designed to offer a clean developer experience without the heaviness of larger frameworks. Unlike Mojolicious, which is full-stack, and Dancer, which aims for minimalism, Trickster focuses on practical essentials with secure, production-ready defaults.

What makes Trickster different:

• Modern architecture: Stateless, signed-cookie sessions and a clean PSGI-native core make it easy to scale and deploy.

• Security-first design: Built-in validation, secure cookies, and CORS support are enabled out of the box.

• Developer-friendly CLI: Includes project scaffolding, generators, and a hot-reload development server—features often found in frameworks like Rails or Express.

• Balanced approach: Trickster offers more structure and tooling than Dancer while remaining lighter and more PSGI-focused than Mojolicious.

The framework is still young, and I would greatly appreciate feedback from the Perl community. I’m actively looking for reviews, suggestions, and real-world impressions to help shape its next steps.

GitHub: https://github.com/tricksterperl/trickster.git

Again in 2026, the Perl/Raku workshop will happen. The city for 2026 is Berlin and it's going to go from Monday 16th of March until Wednesday 18th.

Read the announcement in full.

Eskild Hustvedt has written a nice blog entry on the joy of rediscovering Perl:

So, since I wanted to get away from the node-ecosystem, and my static site generator was written in JS, I thought I would try my hand at writing one in Perl. This is the most fun I've had writing code for years. It's just so nice to write.

I have to agree. While there can be utility in knowing other scripting languages, it is Perl which stands out as being a lot of fun. YMMV.

londonperlworkshop.com

Tentatively:

Over on the GnuPG mailing list, Robert J. Hansen mentioned Perl in his "Cryptography 101" message in the context of reasons to learn group theory:

Group theory is to mathematics what Perl scripting is to system administration: it doesn't get much respect but knowing it is an essential, non-negotiable skill purely because of how much it glues the whole system together.

I'd add that Perl is quite an amplifier of abilities, especially when dealing with text files including config files, JSON, and XML. This is good recognition of its utility.

Based on conversation on Slack, it looks like there is a network issue with CPAN. The symptom is that none of the new uploads are appearing.

The Perl NOC has been contacted. More to come.

DuckDuckGo has made a second $25,000 USD donation to The Perl and Raku Foundation. This is tremendous news, and will help to continue to fund development of Perl. From TPRF President Stuart J Mackintosh:

DuckDuckGo has demonstrated how Perl and its ecosystem can deliver power and scale to drive the DuckDuckGo core systems, plug-in framework and Instant Answers. The Foundation is grateful that DuckDuckGo recognises the importance of Perl, and for their generous funding support for a second year through their charitable donations programme.

SUSE has recently made a big donation to the Core Maintenance Fund for Perl 5:

The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF) is thrilled to announce a substantial $11,500 donation from SUSE, one of the world’s leading enterprise Linux and cloud-native and AI solutions providers. This generous contribution bolsters the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund and demonstrates SUSE’s commitment to the open-source ecosystem.

Good to see.

See full details at perl.com

https://www.shadowcat.co.uk/2025/07/09/ripples-they-cause-in-the-world/

I'm speechless.