Three good ideas we should steal from Python Hero wanted: How to fix the Perl documentation set Bad advice we give beginners Most common beginner mistake that everyone DOESN'T talk about Perl's Biggest Mistake: Reference-to-String conversion Advice from Larry's keynotes that nobody ever takes (e.g., It's OK to program in a subset of Perl. Belong to two different tribes. Perl was designed to work well with other tools. etc.) Pornography detection with Perl Pornography generation with Perl Comparison of the internals of Date::Manip and Date::Calc: Which one stinks worse? Can we find 20 errors in this Matt Wright script in 5 minutes? Report on the state of Perl 6 Best Perl 6 proposal that was ignored Worst Perl 6 proposal that was adopted Criticism (positive, negative, or both) of a part of one of the Perl 6 Apocalypses Biggest single trivial mistake made over the life of Perl 5. (My vote: The "Value of %s can be "0"; test with defined()" warning in 5.005.) One major problem in Perl's OOP system and how Python/C++/Java avoids this problem. (My vote for the problem: Hash member name collisions between base and inherited classes) One major problem in Python/C++/Java's OOP system and how Perl avoids this problem. (My vote: I don't know what the problem is yet, but I bet the solution will turn out to involve AUTOLOAD.) Proposal for a peer review system for CPAN Everything I know about Perl, I learned in kindergarten History of the ??/||| flamewars in p5p Call to action: Let's replace TPJ Strategies for building good test suites A method for evaluating whether a module has a good test suite or not Case study of a module with a bad interface (such as: Mail::Send) Case study of a module with a good interface (such as: LWP::Simple) Overview (or history) of the trend away from dependence on system library functions (such as qsort, printf, stdio, etc.) What's this PerlIO thing I keep hearing about, anyway? Unicode in five minutes. Three useful functions in the POSIX module that you wish you had known about before Overview / history of Ilya Zakharevich's contributions to Perl (Or Graham Barr, Tom Christiansen, Nick Ing-Simmons, Spider Boardman, etc.) Quick look at the new %{}/@{}/${} overloading feature with one useful example Using Perl to generate conference presentations Why it's bad (good) that global variables are the default Most useful feature of the Perl core that nobody seems to know about Three useful but little-known features of DBI What I learned from writing a DBD module Hacking Perl to implement call-cc What is call-cc, anyway? The module with the smallest ratio of utility to frequency-of-use The module with the greatest ratio of utility to frequency-of-use ================================================================ 20030626 A surprising number of those topics are still fresh. Here are a couple of new ones to replace the old stale ones: Three useful but little-known features of DB_File The BerkeleyDB module Three design patterns that make sense for Perl but not for C++ Three modules that have OO interfaces that shouldn't. (Example: File::Spec.) Simple convenience functions for common modules. (Example: Why doesn't MD5 have a built-in function for computing the hash of an entire file, given the filename?) Chicken soup for the Perl soul Why I hate 'map' and 'grep' A handy utility from my 'bin' directory that I use all the time