Highlighting Members of the Perl Family

This past year of blogging has introduced me to a wide variety of people in the Perl community. Some I’ve admired from afar for years due to their published work, and even more, I’ve “met” while interacting on social media and other forums. This will be the first in an occasional series highlighting not just the code, but the people that make up the Perl family.

Paul “LeoNerd” Evans

I first came across Paul Evans’s work during his series last year on writing a core Perl feature; he’s responsible for Perl v5.32’s isa operator and v5.34’s experimental try/catch exception handling syntax. I interviewed him about the latter for Perl.com in March 2021. He’s been active on CPAN for so much longer, though, and joined the Perl Steering Council in July. He’s also often a helpful voice on IRC.

Elliot Holden

Renowned author and trainer Randal L. Schwartz linked over the weekend in a private Facebook group to Elliot Holden’s impassioned YouTube video about his day job as a Perl web application developer. Through his alter ego Urban Guitar Legend, Elliot is also a passionate musician. Besides gigging and recording, he’s been posting videos for nine years. (I’m a bit envious since I took a break from music almost twenty years ago and haven’t managed to recapture it.) Elliot seems like the quintessential needs-to-get-shit-done developer, and Perl is perfect for that.

Gábor Szabó

Gábor Szabó is a polyglot (both in human and computer languages) trainer, consultant, and author, writing about programming and DevOps on his Code Maven and Perl Maven websites. He’s also the founder and co-editor of Perl Weekly and recipient of a Perl White Camel award in 2008 thanks to his organizational and support contributions. Last year he introduced me to the world of live pair programming, working on a web application using the Mojolicious framework.

If you’re on Twitter and looking to connect with other Perl developers, please consider participating in the Perl community I’ve set up there. Twitter communities are topic-specific, moderated discussion groups, unlike the freewheeling #hashtags system that can be diluted by spam or topics that share the same name. Unfortunately, they’re still read-only on the Twitter Android app, but you can participate fully on iOS/iPadOS and the website.