Perl 1 Revitalized

The perl community is happy to announce the appointment of Michael Schwern as the new head of maintenance for Perl 1, the original version of perl. Michael comes to us with considerable experience both in testing and QA, as well as managing scattered groups of programmers. His skills should stand him in good stead heading the maintenance of this long-neglected version of perl.

First released in 1988, this version of the software has fallen into an unfortunate slump with the release of versions 2, 3, 4, and 5 of perl, derivative languages such as Python and Ruby. "We hope to revitalize the perl 1 community, which has long been scoffed at by the users of more recent, 'better' versions of perl."

This version of perl has many advantages over its far more bloated modern rivals. The source kit is barely 1% the size of the current language distributions, and the resulting executable is also much smaller, making it ideal for embedded use. The small source footprint allows for easy auditing of the code. It's also remarkably fast, so much so that you can often completely rebuild it from scratch and run your program in the same time it takes newer, more "feature-full", languages to just compile your program.

News and additional information will be available on the official Perl 1 site, http://dev.perl.org/perl1/, including pointers to the developer mailing list, perl1-porters.

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