5.10

Just a quick word pointing out that perl 5.10 was released the 18th, 20 years after the first perl release. As Grubber says, Perl is the best language in the world. At least to both of us.

The 5.10 release adds a lot of improvements to Perl over the 5.8.x series. I would recommend that you take the time to read through perl5100delta, it should take less than an hour, but its definitively worth it.

My list of favorite features, in order:

• use mro;
• use feature;
• smart match operator;
• new regexp features.

The first will make DBIx::Class, Catalyst, and Moose faster and the second provides a clean path to add new features in future versions of perl.

The third is just too cool for words. You have to see it in action. It's a back-port of a Perl6 operator. As always, Perl has no shame to copy from the [rb]est, even from projects still in development.

The last one brings perl on par with other engines out there, and adds a nice non-recursive implementation and other performance improvements.

Congratulations to all perl-porters out there.