Practical Perl Tools: Oh Say Can You CPAN?

;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution

For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.

Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.

As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.

Every once in a while I get asked to join a conference panel about scripting languages. It will be me, a Pythonista, a Rubyist, and a PHP developer (do they have a cute name?) all onstage together. In most cases, I think the organizers are hoping for the equivalent of a steel cage match in professional wrestling—the fewer participants standing at the end, the better. In these scenarios, I’m almost always a disappointment because I come to praise the other languages, not to bury them. I have a deep appreciation for the other languages, and I’m not afraid to state it even while I’m representing Perl. One of the key reasons I can say “I dig all of the other languages, but I choose to stick with Perl most of the time” is CPAN. This column will focus on CPAN, how to cope with both its triumphs and shortfalls, and some of the ways to interact with it that you may not have encountered before. There probably won’t be any code in this issue’s column but that’s okay because you’ll be learning ways to have other people write Perl code for you. We’re going to focus on how to consume content from CPAN; discussion about how to contribute to it will have to wait for a future column.