Two major Perl events will take place in Italy, thanks to the effort of the Italian Perl users and the Pisa.pm users group.

"In July and August, we had our monthly releases of Parrot, 0.4.14 and 0.4.15. There were various language updates, but one of these deserves special mention. The 0.4.15 release included an implementation of "Not Quite Perl".

"It's that time again! Welcome to another Yet Another Perl Conference, North America Call for Venue. Do you want to bring hundreds of Perl geeks to your city? If so, then please consider submitting your bid for YAPC::NA 2010. Similar to last year, the deadline for submissions is June 10 and the winning bid will be announced at this year's conference in Pittsburgh..."

"Perl 1 was released to the public by Larry Wall 20 years ago today. To celebrate, Perl5Porters have released Perl5.10, the latest stable version of Perl 5. Happy Birthday Perl! ..."

"If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it's worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org by the end of August. We will be awarding the grants by the beginning of October..."

"Moritz Lenz has started a series of blog posts about moving from Perl 5 to Perl 6, including why some design choices were made, and how you can take advantage of some of the Perl 6 features today in Perl 5..."

"...With all this depressing talk you might be discouraged from trying Perl. Don’t be. I could now sit here and enumerate a great list of reasons for you to use Perl today, but, if I did, as though I was the holder of a religious-like truth, it might cause too much controversy. And I don’t want that. Therefore, here are the reasons why I personally use Perl.

"It is with great pleasure that The Perl Foundation and Mozilla Foundation announce a major new Perl 6 Development Grant. The recipient of the grant is Patrick Michaud, the Perl 6 compiler pumpking and lead programmer of a Perl 6 implementation based on Parrot and on his own work on the Perl 6 compiler and grammar..."

Perl's 21st anniversary of release is next Thursday, 18 December. Perl 5 is already 14 years old. Though the language has seen many changes since 1994, it can't stand still. Perl 5.10 added many wonderful features and Perl 6 will change the landscape for programming languages, but what's the vision for Perl 5? How can the language stay relevant?