Hello, okay So this is really weird for me because usually I talk about the new version of Perl after it's out And I know it's going to happen. I'm going to be talking today about Perl 5.22

Which comes out this spring and also Perl 5.20 which came out last spring what you can actually get today is Perl 5.21 and To give you a real quick run-through of what that means every version of Perl 5 We have a new version out every year and the rule is it has to be better than the last version of Perl

And every month there's also a new dev version of Perl and that version just has to be different Somehow and better here means I say it's better So if you trust my taste, you should probably be okay, except you I don't know if you should trust my taste the dev cycle works like this a new version comes out and Then after a little while the bug fix version comes out 5.21 came out

Maybe a month or two after 5.20 and then a few months after that and they start to slow down So eventually it becomes a very long time between releases because we get out all the bugs At this point there are no bugs left in Perl 5.18, which is pretty great The more interesting version of the cycle is what happens on the big red line That's where we are now Perl 5.21. These are the versions that come out every month

Every month on the 20th of the month I think we've only missed the 20th twice in the last four or five years and it comes out at the 21st We come out with a new version and eventually after generally 10 or 11 versions you get the new one and If you're wondering how safe it is to install these the risk over time looks something like this. Here's 5.20 and

and over time 5.20's release series very slowly brings down how scary it might be how many things we're gonna change We have very strict rules about what we can change in a in a released maintenance version. Basically, you can't change anything

On the other hand in bleed we start out exactly the same as 5.20 and We say okay, the code is unfrozen. You can start merging all that stuff You were waiting on and everybody's like, oh great and they apply all these crazy features They've been sitting on for two months and then people see like oh man, why is all my code not working on bleed anymore?

Oh, it's cuz the freeze is over. I can put my stuff in too. And And this goes on for a little while until everything's in and then people start seeing what they've broken And they start fixing it because we don't want to have bad code and now that your code can work again people say great now I can apply my other fixes and and eventually

Eventually, we really start getting down into fixing and people start just doing bug fix releases and then we hit the code freeze Code freeze is when we say at this point You got to stop breaking stuff after the 20th of January Which is which is when they released the the time was this year after the 20th of January no more any weird changes

So on the 19th of January we were kind of like this and then the code freezes begun and we start doing nothing but bug fixes and These turn out to be really really productive months when we really are looking at all the stuff that changed We know there's not gonna be any more weird change and we bring this down and down and down until

Hopefully the new release is just as stable as the previous new release and for the past three or four releases I can see pretty confidently that it's been good 5 20 0 5 18 0 5 16 0 they've been really pretty good They have not had major crazy bugs like we used to have a long time ago before we had these monthly releases in code freeze periods

So I'm gonna be talking about 521 and this is where we are on the cycle right now And what does that mean? It means that something that we like that's in there might still get ripped out between now and release if it's an unfixable bug problem I don't think it's gonna happen It might and just in case what you want to do is come see this talk again at Yapsi North America

It's being held in beautiful Salt Lake City, which everybody should see at least once Then you'll be seeing me talk about for a pro 522 today. You're just seeing me talk about Probably what 522 is like the first thing I want to talk about is getting rid of stuff This is one of my favorite things to do

because Pro 5 as you may not be aware has a lot of weird stuff in it Weird stuff you haven't even seen right and what we want to do is delete all this crazy weird stuff So there's lots more syntactic room in pearl for adding new crazy weird stuff One thing is sigiless style. Maybe you've heard people talk about how pro 6 introduces this cool sigiless style

Well, let me tell you it's not really that exciting and new we've had it in pro 5 forever For example, everybody has seen this you can write this in pro 5 and you can write this in pro 5 standard pro 5 Did you know that you can write that and that pushes on to an array you can get the keys

It's from pearl 1 and nobody ever took it out Until now, so that's gone pearl 6 is that way, you know, you can have it back Pro 5 it's gone another another really interesting thing

Hashes that are references that are not references So if you want to get an element out of a hash, what do you do? You subscript it if you want to put something into a hash. What do you do? You write this? Well if you have just come Yeah, okay

So yeah, that's pearl six