Parrot releases continue to come out once a month. Version 0.5.2 was released in January. The highlight of 0.5.2 for many is surely the inclusion of a perl6 make target, meaning that you can now take a Parrot release and make yourself a Perl 6 binary in just three easy steps: tar -xvzf parrot-x.x.x.tar.gz cd parrot-x.x.x perl ./Configure.pl make perl6 The end result is a perl6 binary that you can

This is a reminder that we plan on closing the open self-nomination period for the TPF Steering Committee Chair, Conference Committee Chair, and PR positions tomorrow. If you're on the fence, it's time to decide. Again, to participate, send me email at cbrandt at perlfoundation dot org and I'll send you an invite to the elections wiki we have set up.

Have you ever wanted to get involved in The Perl Foundation, but didn't know how? Well, now's your chance. I'm pleased to announce open self-nominations for the following TPF roles: "Steering Committee Chair":http://www.perlfoundation.org/steering_committee_chair "Conferences Committee Chair":http://www.perlfoundation.org/conferences_committee_roles "Public Relations":http://www.perlfoundation.org/public_relations You can follow the links above to read descriptions of each of the positions. If you think you're a good fit for one or more of them, send me an email at

A while back, around November 2007, there was "some discussion":http://use.perl.org/~Alias/journal/34801 about performance problems with rt.cpan.org to the point that some found it to be almost unusable. I bring this up here because there were some suggestions that perhaps TPF could buy some new hardware. If you scroll to the bottom, you'll see Jesse Vincent jumped in and said he thought the performance wasn't a hardware problem and he could make

Thanks to some help from Will Willis and Jeremy Fluhmann, of the Perl Foundation conferences committee, yapc.org has a few new items. Specifically, we've included ads from the "Perl community ad server ":http://adserver.szabgab.com/ provided by Gabor Szabo and a new Workshops page that describes how to organize a workshop and what TPF can do to help.

A bunch of new requests for "Act":http://act.mongueurs.net/ -hosted conference sites have gone in to the Act developers and each has offered to update translation files. This is great news as it provides even more Perl events, keeps the Act translation files up-to-date, and it shows the investment by people all over the world to keep Perl vibrant. It also shows the world-wide reach of the Perl community. Some of the

Over the past few months, I've been working with Kurt to evaluate LedgerSMB a Perl-based accounting system that we thought we might be able to start using for our Perl Foundation accounting. So far, it looks promising and we're continuing our evaluation on a demo install. I've been looking for an open source package because we want the flexibility to integrate with Act, the conference software used by many Perl

November and December saw the usual monthly release of Parrot. However, November's release was particularly notable, as it was version 0.5.0. The minor version number increase came because it includes an implementation of the object design as specified in PDD15. This was a major piece of work, both in the implementation, and integration with existing language implementaitons. The 0.5.1 release was also quite exciting. The major work for this release

The Perl Foundation is looking at giving some grants ranging from $500 to $3000 in February 2008. In the past, we've supported Adam Kennedy's PPI, Nicholas Clark's work on Perl internals, Jouke Visser's pVoice, Chris Dolan on Perl::Critic and many others You don't have to have a large, complex, or lengthy project. You don't even have to be a Perl master or guru. If you have a good idea and

Today the Perl Foundation announces the release of Perl 5.10, the first major upgrade to the wildly popular dynamic programming language in over five years. This latest version builds on the successful 5.8.x series by adding powerful new language features and improving the Perl interpreter itself. The Perl development team, called the Perl Porters, has taken features and inspiration from the ambitious Perl 6 project, as well as from chiefly

It is with great pleasure that I announce the November 2007 status report for Patrick Michaud's Perl 6 Development Grant provided jointy by Mozilla Foundation and The Perl Foundation. It can be found at: "http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/35049":http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/35049 This is the first of four monthly status reports. As part of this grant, Patrick will use his use.perl.org journal to collect his writings regarding his work on Perl 6 Parrot. To see a list

It gives me great pleasure to announce that, last month, Chris Dolan successfully completed his "grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2007/04/new_grant_awards.html to write 20 Perl-Best-Practices-inspired policies for "Perl::Critic.":http://search.cpan.org/dist/Perl-Critic/ There are several reasons why this wasn't posted sooner, but I apologise for the delay. Chris delivered 19 out of the 20 policies originally proposed, as one of the policies was implemented by another contributor prior to the start of the grant. During the course of this

It is with great pleasure that The Perl Foundation and Mozilla Foundation announce a major new Perl 6 Development Grant. The recipient of the grant is Patrick Michaud the Perl 6 compiler pumpking and lead programmer of a Perl 6 implementation based on Parrot and on his own work on the Perl 6 compiler and grammar. The grant will provide Patrick with four months of support for this work beginning

The Parrot team has continued to make monthly releases, releasing 0.4.16 in September and 0.4.17 in October. These releases include more work on the NQP language as well as many updates and cleanups for the design documents As usual, there were also plenty of bug fixes, and in particular much of the code was reviewed as part of the effort to complete the PMC design. I'm very happy to report

If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it’s worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org Submission deadline is the last day of November, voting starts in December and we will be awarding the grants by the beginning of January. First, please read about how to submit a grant Read

There's a little more than 24 hours left in the "Frozen Perl 2008 Call for Speakers":http://www.frozen-perl.org/mpw2008/cfs.html. If you've been putting your submission off to the last minute, that last minute is fast approaching. Submissions close at midnight on Tuesday, October 23. If you're on the fence about submitting a proposal, we really hope you do submit something. More proposals gives us more choice, and we really want to encourage new,

The Perl Foundation is pleased to announce the election of Alberto Simões to the position of Grants Committee Chair. Alberto was elected by the Grants Committee members from a pool of four strong candidates. Alberto is president of the Portuguese Association for Perl Programmers the leader of Braga.pm and the co-chair of YAPC::EU 2005 in Braga, Portugal. Alberto is a Ph.D. student in Machine Translation at the University of Minho

As anyone visiting yapc.org in the past will tell you, it was in desperate need of some TLC. I drew some momentum from YAPC::NA this summer and finally gave it a facelift. There's more work to do, but I think it's a big improvement. The front page is built based on a feed from the Perl Community Calendar maintained by brian foy in Google Calendar. If you want your event

The Perl Foundation is pleased to announce new appointments to several board positions: Bill Odom, previously President, becomes Chairman; Richard Dice becomes President; and Jim Brandt becomes Vice President. The board elected these new members in an August 2007 vote by the board members as mandated by the charter. Kurt DeMaagd will continue to serve as Treasurer, and Nat Torkington and Allison Randal will continue to serve as directors. On

In July and August, we had our monthly releases of Parrot, 0.4.14 and 0.4.15. There were various language updates, but one of these deserves special mention. The 0.4.15 release included an implementation of "Not Quite Perl". This language implements a subset of the full Perl 6 feature set, and will be used within the compiler tools for all languages running on Parrot, and as a way to bootstrap a complete