Just got out of a Perl job interview and I’m still scratching my head.

One of the questions was about extracting multiple values from a hash. So naturally, I used a hash slice. Interviewer immediately stopped me and said, “That’s not valid Perl.”

I tried to explain what a hash slice is, even pointed out it’s a super common in idiomatic Perl. But they just doubled down and said I must be confused and that hashes can’t be indexed like arrays. 😐

They moved on, but I could tell I’d already been mentally disqualified. Got the rejection email later today. Honestly getting dinged because I used a core Perl feature that they didn’t know? That stings.

Weirdly, this isn’t the first time. Many years ago, I interviewed at Rent.com in Santa Monica, and one of the folks there also didn’t know what a hash slice was—but at least they still offered me the job!!

UPDATE: I am still looking for a position, so please DM me if you have something. Thanks.

Im currently learning perl by this book but I was wondering if there is a better one, for me is it pretty good but what do you guys think?

I like learning and working in Perl. I personally find it more enjoyable to program in than Python. Python isn't difficult, I just never took a liking to it with its lack of braces and strict indentation. The lack of braces can at times make it difficult to find out what's enclosed in what as code gets longer. Braces just make sense to me.

A lot of syntatical constructs remind me of C which may be the reason why I like it so much. I just wish I can enjoy it without feeling bad or ostracized for liking a less popular language that people claim is only used in legacy systems or on the verge of dying.

Anyone else feel this way ? :(

For the second consecutive year, The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF) is overjoyed to announce a donation of USD 25,000 from DuckDuckGo.

This is our largest gift of 2025 and it will advance some very important work in the Perl 5 core. I'd like to thank Joseph Jerome, Oriol Soriano and Gabriel Weinberg for their support in making this happen. It's a big deal for us. ♥️

More discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45439883

Twenty years is a long time in the world of software. That's how long it's been since I last updated my Perl module, File::Finder. But today, thanks to a bug report from a dedicated user, I'm excited to announce the release of version 1.0.0!

For those who don't know, File::Finder is a handy little module that gives you the power of the find command right in your Perl code. It turns out that it wasn't playing nicely with Windows, and it was high time to fix that.

It's a surreal and wonderful feeling to revisit code you wrote two decades ago and find that it's still useful to people. It's a testament to the power and longevity of Perl and the open-source community.

A big thank you to the user who took the time to report the bug and help me bring this module into the modern era. It's moments like these that make you appreciate the collaborative spirit of software development.

You can find the new, Windows-friendly version of File::Finder on CPAN: https://metacpan.org/pod/File::Finder (https://metacpan.org/pod/File::Finder)

Perl #CPAN #SoftwareDevelopment #LegacyCode #OpenSource #ThrowbackThursday

[this message written with the assistance of Gemini CLI inside VSCode]

Apparently GPT5 (and I assume all the ones prior to it) are trained in datasets that overrepresent Perl. This, along with the terse nature of the language, may explain why the Perl output of the chatbots is usually good.

https://bsky.app/profile/pp0196.bsky.social/post/3lvwkn3fcfk2y

I’m new to Perl, but not new to programming by any means. I’ve spent the last month or two diving very deep into the language, and I’ve had more fun using it than with almost any other throughout my career.

Perl just simply feels incredibly powerful, pragmatic, and beautifully expressive. I think it may grow to become one of the best “tools” in my toolkit as a programmer next to SQL, etc. I’m glad I gave it a try, because it’s so much better than I’ve always heard.

I recently spent several hours tracking down why port 5000 suddenly wasn't available for testing web apps on my dev machine.

I'm posting this for memory's sake and in case someone else is as stumped as I was.

I have several web apps running on Perl's Plack/psgi, behind a proxy server. Each service is assigned to its own port. While I work on a new service on my dev machine, I usually just let plackup assign the port; the default is port 5000.

But yesterday when I invoked the usual call to start up a service, it failed with the message that port 5000 was already in use.

I checked whether I had left a process running on that port, but my terminals/tmux didn't report anything. Searching the Plack-related docs, nothing described how to stop a psgi process other than the usual Control-C in the terminal where it was started - which I didn't have any more.

I started composing a plea for help on the assumption that I had a psgi process running, but no longer had the PID with which to kill it. Gathering info, I found that a port scan revealed that port 5000 was controlled by a process named 'upnp'. But that process name was not recognized by 'which', or by 'killall' for that matter. Was upnp related to "Universal Plug and Play" - UPnP? Seemed like a hint to look more broadly.

Reverting to GUI, I tediously examined every system setting and dug into many property lists, and whaddaya know - I found it!

Recent versions of macOS have a system setting called AirPlay Receiver, under System Settings -> AirDrop and Handoff (v13.2 Ventura). When that setting is enabled, macOS uses an http connection via port 5000 to allow "nearby devices to send video and audio content to your Mac with AirPlay," it says here. I had checked that box when setting up a new OS.

Sure enough, disabling AirPlay Receiver released port 5000 and my plackup invocations worked again!

"Perl has served us quite well since Fastmail’s inception. We’ve built up a large code base that has continued to work, grow, and improve over twenty years. We’ve stuck with Perl because Perl stuck with us: it kept working and growing and improving, and very rarely did those improvements require us to stop the world and adapt to onerous changes."

Thanks to Fastmail for supporting Perl 5 core development. 🙏

It was a real pleasure working with Proxmox to bring them on board as a TPRF sponsor. They immediately understood the importance of supporting Perl 5 core maintenance. I'm looking forward to adding more sponsors to the perl.com sidebar in the coming weeks.

Please reach out to me if you think you may know of a potential sponsor. Finding the key contacts on the inside is the hardest part of the process.

perldelta

It's Perl's 25th birthday! :)

Edit: Mark Keating wrote a few words on this occasion: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/12/the-first-twenty-five-years.html