No, I’m not talking about code (but it made you look, didn’t it!) — I’m talking about optimizing the search for “modern perl”, because right now it sucks.

Give it a try:

Sure, chromatic’s blog and excellent Modern Perl book show up a lot. The Modern::Perl module is there. Depending on the search engine, some Modern Perl SlideShare presentations show up, many of which are pretty technical.

On the other hand, Stevan Little’s Modern Perl presentation is a pretty good history, but is hard to find. Nor is it concise (though it wasn’t meant to be). And I’ve entirely run out of patience to track down other good examples.

There is no obvious web page that introduces “Modern Perl” style to someone. If there’s no page like that, we can’t link to it, which means we can’t optimize search for it, either.

So here is my challenge to the Perl community:

Find the best material you can to explain what “Modern Perl” means. Comment about it below. Blog about it. Twitter about it. Link to it. If you can’t find something you like, try writing a presentation on it yourself. If some person or organization has the means and motivation, draft a page or a white paper on Modern Perl for perl.org or go buy modernperl.com and put it up.

For whatever reason, the phrase “Modern Perl” has caught on and it’s a good catch-phrase to differentiate the latest best style, patterns and libraries for Perl. But a catch phrase is only helpful if there’s depth behind it. chromatic’s book — great as it is — shouldn’t be the only reference.