Perl 5.11.1
I've been behind in my blogging; time seems to fly when one is having fun, and I've been having a pretty good time recently. Most of it's involved working with people and science, rather than technology. After I finish my taxes (not yet overdue), this may change.

In the meantime, I can't go without mentioning that Perl 5.11.1 has been released. This isn't a stable version of Perl, but it's a point release on the way toward 5.12.0. I'm quite excited about 5.12.0 for many reasons I'll go into later, but they all involving modernisation of the language.

Of note in 5.11.1 (and hence 5.12.0) is that deprecation warnings are turned on by default. This isn't scary; it means that if you've got old code that's going to break in the future, then Perl will start warning you about that well in advance.

Of other note is a minor point, and that's the ability to include version numbers in package declarations. One can now write package Foo::Bar 1.23, rather than having to do cumbersome things with the $VERSION package variable.