What is "Modern Perl 5"?

So, the theme for YAPC::NA::2010 is going to be "Modern Perl 5". Other than a cool marketing buzzword, what exactly does that mean?

Sometimes, it's easier to start with what this doesn't mean.

There's a quasi-truism that says something like "You can always recognize someone's original language in Perl." C programmers write C in Perl. Java programmers do the same thing. (And, wow can you tell a sysadmin who's only ever used awk and sed!) It's easy to recognize "good Perl," but can we describe it?

Perl is also oft-maligned as "a bunch of line-noise." While it's easy to dismiss those complaints as from "sigil haters" or "regex newbies," there is definitely some truth that Perl tends to be much denser than other languages. And, that's a strength of our language - one we get from our FP roots. It's quite common to translate a program from C to Perl and get LOC ratios of 20-1 or higher. I once saw higher than 100-1 and it was well-written C.

Lastly, one of the great promises of Perl 6 is that it will allow sane grammar modification. We don't have that yet. But, Devel::Declare does get us quite close. Syntactic sugar isn't about less keystrokes - it's about being clear about the intent of the code. In my opinion, C's typedef is one of its most powerful features.

Putting it all together, this is what Modern Perl 5 is all about:

• A Perl "style"
• Readably dense code
• Literate code

The best example of this is Moose. Everything in Moose can be implemented in pure Perl. (Some is in XS for performance, but it doesn't have to be.) Code written using Moose is unarguably in a Perl style. The code is very dense (easily 20-1 to C or Java), but it's clear at the same time. There are several kinds of subroutine declarations, each making it clear what its intention is.

Moose will have at least one track devoted to it and there's going to be at least one class on Moose during the after-YAPC. What else is there that epitomizes those "Modern Perl 5" features? How did you bring those features to your pre-modern codebases? What advice can you give someone on how to make their code modern? Did I even get all the features of "Modern Perl 5" correct?

Why am I asking all these questions? Because I want your talk submissions!