I'm not a core contributor or developer so I don't know how much my opinion really matters... but here are some things I'd really like to see in Perl v5.36. 1. |trim()| finally lands This has been a pull-request since Jul 27th 2020. I'd really like to come to some conclusion on this so I can clear up the mental bandwidth to do other things. 2. Sub-routine signatures made non-experimental and enabled via |use v5.36| There was brief talk about making signatures non-experimental for v5.34 but we didn't have enough time. I believe the general consensus was to do it, but we ran out of time. Let's finally launch signatures. *Six* years as experimental is enough. We can always improve them later if need. They should also be enabled with |use v5.36|. 3. Warnings enabled with |use v5.36| Along with #2 this was briefly discussed but we ran out of time. Seems like a no-brainer to enable this with |use v5.36|. Honestly I'm surprised we don't already do this. 4. |--long-words| for Perl interpreter As we approach Perl 7+ we're running out of single letters that are available for |perlrun|. It would give us a lot more flexibility moving forward to enable full words as arguments for the Perl interpreter itself. 5. We need a better debug printer in CORE. Promote |Data::Dump| to a dual-life core module Literally every Perl developer I spoke with said they use |Data::Dump| instead of |Data::Dumper| for debug printing. |Data::Dump| is a better debug printer, and (for my use cases) better in every way. We need better debug printing in CORE. Personally I use |Data::Dump::Color| but I'd settle for the monochrome version in CORE. Anything is better than |Data::Dumper|. 6. Figure out "JSON" I'm tired of explaining Perl's funky JSON support to new users. |JSON::MaybeXS|? |Cpanel::JSON::XS|? |JSON::PP|? Can we just make |JSON| dual-life in CORE and then new users can just |use JSON| and it will work? |JSON::PP| is probably fine for 98% of use cases, and is already core. If a user needs faster JSON we can just tell them to install a XS JSON module and it will just work (tm) with |use JSON|. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here's to a prosperous 2021 for Perl. - ScottchiefbakerThread Next