Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and good tidings to you all. We've concluded the sixteenth annual Perl Advent Calendar in good cheer and good spirits.

Without You This Would Not Be Possible

The Perl Advent Calendar is a team effort, and it wouldn't be possible to produce it without the help from everyone involved. This year thanks are due for the contributions made by Alex Balhatchet, Arthur Axel "fREW" Schmidt, Dave Cross, Dave Rolsky, David Cantrell, David Precious, Graham Ollis, Ivan Kruglov, James Laver, Johann Rolschewski, Marcus Ramberg, Mark Fowler, Masayuki Matsuki, Neil Bowers, Olaf Alders, openstrike, Pete Houston, Paul "LeoNerd" Evans, Ricardo SIGNES, Sergey Romanov, Shoichi Kaji, and Yanick Champoux. Thanks everyone!

And of course, it wouldn't be possible without all the readers enjoying the articles each day, so thanks to you too.

In early February 2016 I'll be starting the whole process over again with a call for participation for the 2016 Perl Advent Calendar. If you're reading then then I'd strongly recommend you write an article, especially if you've not written one before!

The Gift of The CPAN

Advent may be once again over but the CPAN is the gift that keeps on giving, and each year it gets better and better!

Right now as I write this the CPAN has one hundred and fifty eight thousand five hundred and fifty nine modules published to it. That means that - in addition to updates to existing modules - since I wrote this Christmas Day entry last year for the 2014 Advent Calendar sixteen thousand eight hundred and ten new modules have been uploaded, or in other words a growth of nearly 12% in just one year!

To put this in some context, if you took just five minutes to install, examine and play with each of these new modules it'd be nearly the end of February before you were done (If you were to do the same for every module on the CPAN...you'd miss next year's advent calendar totally and you'd finally be done in June 2017!) That is, assuming of course, you didn't stop to sleep or eat or anything else.

This sounds like a lot of work! Where can you find out about all this the lazy way? As always:

• You can search for Perl modules at metacpan where you can also see a list of recently published modules
• CPAN Ratings offers a ratings and reviews of Perl modules. It's like a democratic advent calendar each day of the year!
• The Perl Weekly provides one small succinct email a week with a summary of the interesting things happing in Perl that week, including new modules, interesting articles and upcoming events.
• blogs.perl.org hosts a vast number of Perl blogs if you're looking for more articles to read throughout the year. The Perl Ironman Challenge links to a lot more blogs as part of the updating your Perl blog weekly challenge
• Of course, if you want more Perl Advent articles, there's always the previous fifteen years of advent calendar to go through. Happy reading!

That One More Thing

This Christmas is the Christmas many in the Perl community have been waiting for: The one where we get a whole new programming language!

Perl 6 is a sister language to Perl 5: Rebuilt from scratch, with exciting refined syntax and capabilities, Perl 6 is designed to appeal to the discerning Perl programmer. It's been under development for many years, but finally this Christmas we're getting all our Christmases at once: The first major release!

You can find out more about Perl 6 over at perl6.org. Heck, they've even got their own advent calendar...

Until next year....Merry Christmas, one and all.