1. Perl 5.16 and Beyond
Friday, July 29, 11

2. Jesse Vincent
Friday, July 29, 11

3. Pumpking
Friday, July 29, 11

4. Former Perl 6
Project Manager
Friday, July 29, 11

5. What's a Pumpking?
Friday, July 29, 11

6. BDFL
Friday, July 29, 11

7. BDFL
Friday, July 29, 11

8. BDFL
Friday, July 29, 11

9. I make decisions
Friday, July 29, 11

10. I’m a manager
Friday, July 29, 11

11. I don’t do “real work”
Friday, July 29, 11

12. So, who makes Perl?
Friday, July 29, 11

13. Many awesome people
Friday, July 29, 11

14. I just stand around
looking pretty...
Friday, July 29, 11

15. ...while other people do
awesome stuff
Friday, July 29, 11

16. Is your name in Perl’s
AUTHORS file?
Friday, July 29, 11

17. Are you a
CPAN author?
Friday, July 29, 11

18. You rock
Friday, July 29, 11

19. You make Perl
Friday, July 29, 11

20. The Release Process
Friday, July 29, 11

21. Releases in the last
12-or-so months:
Friday, July 29, 11

22. 5.12.2
Friday, July 29, 11

23. 5.12.3
Friday, July 29, 11

24. 5.12.4
Friday, July 29, 11

25. 5.13.2
Friday, July 29, 11

26. 5.13.3
Friday, July 29, 11

27. 5.13.4
Friday, July 29, 11

28. 5.13.5
Friday, July 29, 11

29. 5.13.6
Friday, July 29, 11

30. 5.13.7
Friday, July 29, 11

31. 5.13.8
Friday, July 29, 11

32. 5.13.9
Friday, July 29, 11

33. 5.13.10
Friday, July 29, 11

34. 5.13.11
Friday, July 29, 11

35. 5.14.0
Friday, July 29, 11

36. 5.14.1
Friday, July 29, 11

37. 5.15.0
Friday, July 29, 11

38. 5.15.1
Friday, July 29, 11

39. Perl 5.14.1 is the
current release
of Perl 5
Friday, July 29, 11

40. It came out 6ish
weeks ago
Friday, July 29, 11

41. As did Perl 5.12.4
Friday, July 29, 11

42. As did Perl 5.15.0
Friday, July 29, 11

43. It used to take us 3
weeks to prepare
a release
Friday, July 29, 11

44. And we made the
Pumpking do it
Friday, July 29, 11

45. Now it takes
less than a day
Friday, July 29, 11

46. The 43 step process is
documented
Friday, July 29, 11

47. Releases are still a
chore if you do them
every month
Friday, July 29, 11

48. Now we have rotating
release engineers
Friday, July 29, 11

49. Most of them are
new committers
Friday, July 29, 11

50. Nice side effect:
release engineers
need commit bits
Friday, July 29, 11

51. Since the move to git,
we’ve nearly doubled
our committer list
Friday, July 29, 11

52. The world hasn’t ended
Friday, July 29, 11

53. Some of those release
engineers have become
prolific contributors
Friday, July 29, 11

54. I just make decisions
Friday, July 29, 11

55. I try to get them right
Friday, July 29, 11

56. Sometimes
they’re wrong
Friday, July 29, 11

57. I have a little
bit of cover
Friday, July 29, 11

58. Rule 1
Friday, July 29, 11

59. Larry is always right
Friday, July 29, 11

60. Rule 2
Friday, July 29, 11

61. Larry is allowed to
change his mind
Friday, July 29, 11

62. I’m not Larry
Friday, July 29, 11

63. I’m nowhere
near as clever
Friday, July 29, 11

64. My shirts are nowhere
near as loud
Friday, July 29, 11

65. At YAPC::NA, Larry
said that the time of
hero-pumpkings is over
Friday, July 29, 11

66. D
Friday, July 29, 11

67. Dictator
Friday, July 29, 11

68. Delegator
Friday, July 29, 11

69. Documenter
Friday, July 29, 11

70. Thankfully, Larry’s rules
set me up to succeed
Friday, July 29, 11

71. Rule 1 definitely
doesn’t apply to
the Perl 5 runtime
Friday, July 29, 11

72. However
Friday, July 29, 11

73. The core needs more
support for Rule 2
Friday, July 29, 11

74. I haven’t heard this
in a while:
Friday, July 29, 11

75. Perl is Dead!
Friday, July 29, 11

76. What I’ve been
hearing lately:
Friday, July 29, 11

77. Where are we going?
Friday, July 29, 11

78. It’s changing too fast.
Can you slow down?
Friday, July 29, 11

79. You made regexes
crazier?$#@!?
Friday, July 29, 11

80. smartmatch isn’t
named correctly...
Friday, July 29, 11

81. ...can we rename it to
psychoticmatch?
Friday, July 29, 11

82. The future
Friday, July 29, 11

83. I’ve been accused of
lacking a vision for Perl
Friday, July 29, 11

84. What I lack is a
flame-proof suit.
Friday, July 29, 11

85. If I’d talked about my
vision 2 years ago...
Friday, July 29, 11

86. You would have
laughed at me
Friday, July 29, 11

87. ...now that we can do
do releases...
Friday, July 29, 11

88. A Vision
Friday, July 29, 11

89. New versions of Perl
shouldn’t break your
existing software
Friday, July 29, 11

90. Old syntax and
semantics can’t stop
Perl 5 from evolving
Friday, July 29, 11

91. We need to be able to
make mistakes
as we rebuild Perl 5
Friday, July 29, 11

92. We will
make mistakes
as we rebuild Perl 5
Friday, July 29, 11

93. *coughsmartmatchcough*
Friday, July 29, 11

94. We have
made mistakes
as we’ve rebuilt Perl
Friday, July 29, 11

95. We need to be able to
recover from mistakes
as we rebuild Perl
Friday, July 29, 11

96. The runtime footprint
is too big and must be
slimmed down
Friday, July 29, 11

97. Perl should have
sane defaults
Friday, July 29, 11

98. It should be possible
to build more of Perl
in Perl
Friday, July 29, 11

99. Perl should run
everywhere
Friday, July 29, 11

100. Not just on every kind
of hardware
Friday, July 29, 11

101. or every OS
Friday, July 29, 11

102. Every VM
Friday, July 29, 11

103. Every Browser
Friday, July 29, 11

104. Every Phone
Friday, July 29, 11

105. How do we get there?
Friday, July 29, 11

106. New versions of Perl
shouldn’t break
existing software
Friday, July 29, 11

107. Old syntax and semantics
must not stop Perl 5
from evolving
Friday, July 29, 11

108. When your code runs,
you have no idea
what semantics it’ll see
Friday, July 29, 11

109. You need to jump
through defensive
hoops.
Friday, July 29, 11

110. Lots of defensive hoops
Friday, July 29, 11

111. use v5.14;
Friday, July 29, 11

112. “Can I have a Perl that’s
5.14 or newer?”
Friday, July 29, 11

113. “Anything newer than
5.14.0 would be great!”
Friday, July 29, 11

114. “Ok. I’m 5.30.
Have fun!”
Friday, July 29, 11

115. That’s not useful
Friday, July 29, 11

116. It needs to change
Friday, July 29, 11

117. Declare the version of
Perl 5 you expect
Friday, July 29, 11

118. use v5.16;
Friday, July 29, 11

119. “I want a Perl that
works like 5.16”
Friday, July 29, 11

120. The runtime should
honor that request
Friday, July 29, 11

121. Perl should give you
semantics as close as
possible to what you
request
Friday, July 29, 11

122. New features
should not work
under ‘use v5.$older;’
Friday, July 29, 11

123. It’s critical that we be
able to evolve
Friday, July 29, 11

124. We need an
escape hatch
Friday, July 29, 11

125. We don’t have one
Friday, July 29, 11

126. We need
Rule 2
Friday, July 29, 11

127. Changes to syntax or
semantics break
existing code
Friday, July 29, 11

128. Why?
Friday, July 29, 11

129. They conflict with
existing syntax
Friday, July 29, 11

130. They change the
meaning of existing
semantics
Friday, July 29, 11

131. They conflict with
things users do
Friday, July 29, 11

132. What do we do?
Friday, July 29, 11

133. If you declare an old
version, you get old
syntax and semantics
Friday, July 29, 11

134. ...at least to the
best of our abilities
Friday, July 29, 11

135. Perfection isn’t possible
Friday, July 29, 11

136. We can get far closer
than we do now
Friday, July 29, 11

137. Breaking existing code
should be a last resort
Friday, July 29, 11

138. We will break
backward compatibility
in limited circumstances
Friday, July 29, 11

139. Some craziness can’t be
fixed in an “optional”
or lexical way
Friday, July 29, 11

140. This is going to be
hard work
Friday, July 29, 11

141. A lot of hard work
Friday, July 29, 11

142. It’s not impossible
Friday, July 29, 11

143. I have proof
Friday, July 29, 11

144. Deprecation
Friday, July 29, 11

145. Our current
deprecation cycle
is 1 year
Friday, July 29, 11

146. “It warns in 5.16.0”
Friday, July 29, 11

147. “It’s gone in 5.18.0”
Friday, July 29, 11

148. That’s turning out
to be too short
Friday, July 29, 11

149. Very few operating
systems release that
frequently
Friday, July 29, 11

150. “Declare by default”
means we can make
some changes sooner
Friday, July 29, 11

151. If it still works in old
code, we can change it
with no deprecation cycle
Friday, July 29, 11

152. Some old misfeatures
need to come out lest
they block significant
improvements
Friday, July 29, 11

153. If we can’t emulate the
old feature for old
code, we need a longer
deprecation cycle
Friday, July 29, 11

154. “It dies in code that
declares ‘use v5.16’”
Friday, July 29, 11

155. “It warns in older
code on 5.16.0”
Friday, July 29, 11

156. “It still warns in old
code on 5.18.0”
Friday, July 29, 11

157. “It’s gone in 5.20.0”
Friday, July 29, 11

158. Old Modules
Friday, July 29, 11

159. We haven’t just been
deprecating and yanking
broken old features
Friday, July 29, 11

160. We’ve been doing the
same to old modules
Friday, July 29, 11

161. They all end up
on CPAN
Friday, July 29, 11

162. This has started to hurt
users who wrote code
with “no non-core deps”
Friday, July 29, 11

163. We need to make it
easier to ship two
flavors of Perl 5
Friday, July 29, 11

164. Hotel California
Friday, July 29, 11

165. aka Traditional Perl
Friday, July 29, 11

166. The Times,They
Are A-Changin’
Friday, July 29, 11

167. aka Bootstrappable Perl
Friday, July 29, 11

168. There’s work going on
to make this easier
Friday, July 29, 11

169. Cleaning up
the language
Friday, July 29, 11

170. The runtime footprint
is too big and must be
slimmed down
Friday, July 29, 11

171. One of the points of
doing this is to
clean up the core
Friday, July 29, 11

172. How does this
clean up the core?
Friday, July 29, 11

173. Perl is a big language
Friday, July 29, 11

174. There are bigger
languages
Friday, July 29, 11

175. It's harder to manage
a big language
Friday, July 29, 11

176. It’s harder to learn
a big language
Friday, July 29, 11

177. It’s harder to fix bugs in
a big language
Friday, July 29, 11

178. We’re ok, but not
amazing at core
language dev
Friday, July 29, 11

179. As a community, we’re
awesome at modules
Friday, July 29, 11

180. How do we make Perl
a smaller language?
Friday, July 29, 11

181. It’s possible to load
modules that inject
new builtins
Friday, July 29, 11

182. It’s possible to load
modules that inject
old builtins
Friday, July 29, 11

183. Time to start...
Friday, July 29, 11

184. ...refactoring
Friday, July 29, 11

185. Lots of stuff in perl isn't
necessarily part of
Perl 5 the Language
Friday, July 29, 11

186. This stuff is part of
Perl 5 the chainsaw
Friday, July 29, 11

187. I like our chainsaw
Friday, July 29, 11

188. I’m not talking about
deprecating this stuff
Friday, July 29, 11

189. ...just about
decoupling it
Friday, July 29, 11

190. SysV IPC functions
Friday, July 29, 11

191. Socket IO functions
Friday, July 29, 11

192. Unix user & group
information functions
Friday, July 29, 11

193. Unix network
information functions
Friday, July 29, 11

194. Process and process
group functions
Friday, July 29, 11

195. Formats
Friday, July 29, 11

196. smartmatch
Friday, July 29, 11

197. ...and probably a bunch
of other stuff
Friday, July 29, 11

198. That bit about “forcing
a version declaration”
Friday, July 29, 11

199. If you don’t, you’ll get
whatever was in 5.14.
Friday, July 29, 11

200. The implementation of
SysV might be a module
Friday, July 29, 11

201. As a developer writing
code in Perl 5,
you won’t need to care
Friday, July 29, 11

202. ..and shouldn’t
be able to tell
Friday, July 29, 11

203. In the future we might
fix a bug or two in the
modularized code
Friday, July 29, 11

204. You could take the
update without having
to upgrade all of Perl 5
Friday, July 29, 11

205. Someday we might
remove things from the
default runtime
Friday, July 29, 11

206. Every feature we
externalize reclaims
precious memory
Friday, July 29, 11

207. Every feature we
externalize reclaims
precious sanity
Friday, July 29, 11

208. That just means you’ll
need to declare you
want an older feature
Friday, July 29, 11

209. ...but only if you ask for
v5.16
Friday, July 29, 11

210. ...but only if you ask for
v5.18
Friday, July 29, 11

211. ...but only if you ask for
v5.20
Friday, July 29, 11

212. Existing code
won’t break
Friday, July 29, 11

213. There are many, many
unanswered questions
Friday, July 29, 11

214. But it’s doable
Friday, July 29, 11

215. I have proof!
Friday, July 29, 11

216. Case study:
Smartmatch
Friday, July 29, 11

217. After YAPC::NA rjbs
(and others) raised the
issue of smartmatch
Friday, July 29, 11

218. Perl has a history of
theft from other
languages
Friday, July 29, 11

219. Perl has a history of
borrowing from other
languages
Friday, July 29, 11

220. We stole
smartmatch
from Perl 6
Friday, July 29, 11

221. It’s very clever
Friday, July 29, 11

222. It’s nearly
impossible
to explain
Friday, July 29, 11

223. It’s nearly
impossible
to understand
Friday, July 29, 11

224. RJBS (the previous
speaker) proposed a
saner, much less clever,
smart match
Friday, July 29, 11

225. I don’t want to break
existing code that uses
smartmatch
Friday, July 29, 11

226. Jesse Luehrs (DOY)
was sitting in the back
of my YAPC talk
Friday, July 29, 11

227. He...
Friday, July 29, 11

228. ...threw himself
at the problem
Friday, July 29, 11

229. He extracted
smartmatch into
an XS module
Friday, July 29, 11

230. He reimplemented it
entirely in pure perl
Friday, July 29, 11

231. It’s slower, but it’s
understandable and
hackable
Friday, July 29, 11

232. He implemented
Ricardo’s saner smart
match as an alternative
Friday, July 29, 11

233. I’m hoping that 5.16
ships DOY’s
smartmatch
implementations
Friday, July 29, 11

234. 'use v5.16;' should load
the new one in your
scope
Friday, July 29, 11

235. 'use v5.14;' should load
the old one in your
scope
Friday, July 29, 11

236. no “use v5.x;” line
should load the old one
in your scope.
Friday, July 29, 11

237. We need a module
hierarchy for such
things in core
Friday, July 29, 11

238. The Test Suite
Friday, July 29, 11

239. (Keeping us honest)
Friday, July 29, 11

240. We have an
amazing
test suite
Friday, July 29, 11

241. Over time, we need to
tease apart (at least)
3 kinds of tests
Friday, July 29, 11

242. Language tests
Friday, July 29, 11

243. Bug-fix tests
Friday, July 29, 11

244. Implementation tests
Friday, July 29, 11

245. To hold us to the
compatibility promises
we make, we need a
new test harness
Friday, July 29, 11

246. “Run the test suites we
shipped with previous
releases...”
Friday, July 29, 11

247. ...all of em
Friday, July 29, 11

248. We've been moving
pretty fast
Friday, July 29, 11

249. We’ve done some
things I...
Friday, July 29, 11

250. ...wouldn’t do again
Friday, July 29, 11

251. I’m going to be a lot
more skeptical about
new features
Friday, July 29, 11

252. ...at least ones that
don’t make it easier to
have fewer features
Friday, July 29, 11

253. We should have sane
defaults
Friday, July 29, 11

254. There’s lots of crazy
in Perl 5
Friday, July 29, 11

255. Syntactic Crazy
Friday, July 29, 11

256. Semantic Crazy
Friday, July 29, 11

257. Internal Crazy
Friday, July 29, 11

258. Module Crazy
Friday, July 29, 11

259. It may be time to
consider doing away
with some of that
Friday, July 29, 11

260. But ONLY if you
declare “use v5.16”
Friday, July 29, 11

261. But ONLY if you
declare “use v5.18”
Friday, July 29, 11

262. But ONLY if you
declare “use v5.20”
Friday, July 29, 11

263. We’ve started down
this road
Friday, July 29, 11

264. “use v5.12” includes
“use strict;”
Friday, July 29, 11

265. Where do we go next?
Friday, July 29, 11

266. warnings on by default
Friday, July 29, 11

267. autodie-esque defaults
Friday, July 29, 11

268. autodie does good for
your code
Friday, July 29, 11

269. using deep, scary evil
Friday, July 29, 11

270. I will not show
you the evil
Friday, July 29, 11

271. Ask Paul Fenwick
Friday, July 29, 11

272. The guy with the
accent
Friday, July 29, 11

273. In the hat
Friday, July 29, 11

274. We should throw
exceptions rather than
just return on failure
Friday, July 29, 11

275. I don’t want us to
bikeshed an exception
hierarchy
Friday, July 29, 11

276. Heck, I’d be happy if we
started with dying with
well-defined strings
Friday, July 29, 11

277. (I’d love an exception hierarchy)
Friday, July 29, 11

278. 2-arg open()
gone by default
Friday, July 29, 11

279. 1-arg open()
gone by default?
Friday, July 29, 11

280. Latin-1 autopromote
off by default
Friday, July 29, 11

281. utf-8 everything
by default
Friday, July 29, 11

282. A clean, simple
meta-model with basic
classes and methods
Friday, July 29, 11

283. No indirect object syntax
by default
Friday, July 29, 11

284. But only if you declare
“use v5.16”
Friday, July 29, 11

285. But only if you declare
“use v5.18”
Friday, July 29, 11

286. But only if you declare
“use v5.20”
Friday, July 29, 11

287. So, Why?
Friday, July 29, 11

288. Perl needs to be
cleaner, simpler and
easier to work with
Friday, July 29, 11

289. For users...
Friday, July 29, 11

290. ...and for implementers
Friday, July 29, 11

291. Perl should run
everywhere
Friday, July 29, 11

292. Why isn’t Perl 5 on
other Runtimes?
Friday, July 29, 11

293. “There’s no spec”
Friday, July 29, 11

294. That didn’t stop Ruby
Friday, July 29, 11

295. “Only Perl 5 can
parse Perl 5”
Friday, July 29, 11

296. That didn't stop PPI
Friday, July 29, 11

297. To survive, a desperate
hacker needs to be able
to reimplement Perl 5
Friday, July 29, 11

298. Thanks!
Friday, July 29, 11

299. How do we make this
happen faster?
Friday, July 29, 11

300. Perl 5 Maint Fund
Friday, July 29, 11

301. perlfoundation.org
Friday, July 29, 11

302. Questions/Tomatoes?
http://blog.fsck.com
jesse@perl.org
@obra
Friday, July 29, 11

303. About the name
Friday, July 29, 11

304. Our language is called
Perl 5
Friday, July 29, 11

305. Perl 6 is our
precocious
kid sister
Friday, July 29, 11

306. I’m happy to talk about
renaming Perl 5...
Friday, July 29, 11

307. ...if you write me a
second implementation
that passes the test suite
Friday, July 29, 11