Hello, unfrozen Paleolithic Perl programmers! Welcome to 2015!



First, let’s start with the good news: yes, we’re still programming in Perl5 in 2015 (and yes, we think that’s good news). Indeed, most of the code you wrote in the past, before that unfortunate "Big Giant Hole in Ice" incident, will likely still work just fine on the current release of Perl5 -- even if you originally wrote it against Perl 4 or even Perl 3.



Here’s the bad news: there’s been an incredible amount of innovation in not only Perl5-the-language, but also in Perl5-the-community and what the community considers to be accepted best practices and the right way to do things. It can be very frightening and confusing!



But wait, there’s more good news: if you come to this talk, you’ll get a guided tour of my (reasonably opinionated) views on what the consensus best practices are around issues such as which version of Perl5 to use, system Perl versus non-system Perl, Perl5 installation management packages, new language features and libraries to use, old language features and libraries to avoid, modern tooling, and even more!