That doesn't look work-related...

How many of you are in my shoes? There isn't much scope for Perl coding in your day job, so you find yourself furtively browsing Metacpan, checking the latest Perl Weekly on your lunch hour, and dream about getting beyond Initiate. Maybe you scribble ideas in the margins of your weekly status report for that cool lowercase mononym you'll use for your first O'Reilly book (krusty...feldspar...molewhack...). But on the weekends, you're scaling the peaks of DBIx::Class, and basking in the tropical climes of Mojolicious.

It's too bad so many in my line of work (bioinformatics) say they "know Perl", but continue to write translated C and fill their code with &functions. Fine, TMTOWTDI, but there is room for personal growth. Problem is, this is the kind of coding that perpetuates the myth that Perl is somehow antiquated, unable to deal with modern problems or find a place in the ecosystem of languages. Sharing the fun of Modern Perl here with my colleagues and others is one small effort to help turn this tide.

I won't claim to have deep insights. I won't be able to back up my love of Module::Build with a cogent flameproof argument. I'll being trying to make my Perl more sophisticated = more maintainable, more readable, more shareable, and basically cooler, and I'll share what I learn as I can.