I've spent the last few days at the French Perl Workshop. As well as my brand new talk, I gave two re-runs of two that I had given before. One was entirely new to the French audience, and the other one was from quite a while back and given a face lift so it seemed new (in fact, it was the first talk I ever gave to the Perl community; it was on the topic of web security, and from the web code I encounter it is no less relevant today than it was then). That was 100 minutes worth of talks, which was a pleasure thanks to a great audience.

The keynote talk covered some of the new features and improvements coming in Perl 5.10. While the Perl 6 project progresses to bring us the future version of Perl, Perl 5 is still what people are using to get work done today and thus a new release is most welcome. Many improvements have been made to the regex engine, to fix bugs, increase performance and introduce new features. I was lucky enough to spend considerable time talking about these changes with the guy who was doing most of them back at the German Perl Workshop in February. It is great to see that they will be available in an official release soon. There are also some features taken from Perl 6, including the "say" keyword (like "print" with a newline on the end automatically - something you often want anyway), the "given" block (a bit like a switch statement in other languages, but more powerful) and an short-circuit operator for checking if a value is defined rather than just false due to its value.

There at the workshop, during at lightning talk, Release Candidate 1 of Perl 5.10 was made. It is expected this year, sometime in December, provided no problems show up in the release candidate that blocks this.

Thanks to everyone who was there and made it such an enjoyable time. I'm already really looking forward to my next conference outing - in Israel - and have also submitted talk proposals for another couple of Perl conferences in 2008 too. I don't have any plans for appearances at non-Perl conferences, but I'm open to offers - contact me if you're interested.