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Perl 6 is a new language, not just an upgrade. Perl 5 has not been neglected, and continues to receive updates and new features (some of them originally developed for Perl 6). The plan is to continue Perl 5 support and development indefinitely, irrespective of the status of Perl 6. And of course Perl 5 has its own advent calendar, which this year focuses on interesting stuff you can do with various CPAN modules:

http://www.perladvent.org/2009/

I don't know of anything exactly the same, but the Perl culture is full of fun playthings centered on enjoyment of the language for its own sake. One might even argue that much of the development process of Perl 6 itself has this flavor, with Apocalypses and Exegeses that partially are language specifications, but are really more like essays or articles on programming in Perl and how positive it is. That's to say the least of things like the Perl advent calendar, which are much more like the Python challenge.

Having said that, I think that there probably should be something more for Perl along the lines of a programming challenge in particular, rather than just fun dialogue.

The one language that I think is in dire need of this sort of stuff, more than Perl or Python, is Ocaml. It's a powerful language with a dedicated fan base, who enjoy programming in it for its own sake, but lacks the sort of cohesive community that other languages have. A programming challenge sort of thing might appeal to those who might be interested in OCaml.

Donate them to someone who wants to actually pull off a legitimate version.

This along with the fact that the Perl Advent Calendar hasn't been updated since Dec. 21 ruined my Internet Christmas.

Where he talks about some of the Acme:: modules: Perl 2003 Advent Calendar: Acme::Code::FreedomFighter.

Then, you can go explore the rest of the Acme namespace.

Just to echo rwinston's comments above, this is darn good stuff ... and for December 1st they are talking about DateTime which is an extremely useful module which I've used in a variety of code.

• #21: WWW::Mechanize 101
• #22: Scraping with WWW::Mechanize
• #36: Downloading Images from Webshots
• #44: Archiving Yahoo! Groups Messages with WWW::Yahoo::Groups (which uses Mech)
• #64: Super Author Searching
• #73: Scraping TV Listings

• WWW::Mechanize::Examples
  A random bunch of examples submitted by users, included with the Mechanize distribution.
• http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/01/22/mechanize.htm l
  Chris Ball's article about using WWW::Mechanize for scraping TV listings. (repurposed into hack #73 above)
• http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/LinuxMag/col47.ht ml
  Randal Schwartz's article on scraping Yahoo News for images.
• http://www.perladvent.org/2002/16th/
  WWW::Mechanize on the Perl Advent Calendar 2002, by Mark Fowler.

and look up the 3rd day

Hmm, about nine comments. Good to see my calendar is well loved ;-)

The original poster neglected to mention there's a mirror at http://mirror.perladvent.org incase my server falls over for any reason. Not that it does that a lot, but last year the part London where my server's located had a nasty power cut on the 4th, so I guess anything's possible.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask them, but since it's half one in the morning atm, answers will have to wait until I've had some kip