Nothing ground-breaking, but some nice new features in MonoDevelop 2.8.

MonoDevelop is for me one of the IDEs Padre can still learn a lot from …

Quite a thourough review of CPAN modules for spelling out numbers in English.

Interesting piece about the threshold for contributors from different cultures.

Also some good comments, e.g. from Donnie Berkholz:

… the same things important to increasing contribution from high-context cultures are *also* important to recruiting and retaining contributors in low-context cultures. Relationships and integration into the community trumps everything.

I fully agree. The Padre project is doing things the right way here. There is a Code of Conduct and a Diversity Statement, the community is open and welcoming, development is public and transparent, developers are spread around the globe (Germany, Israel, Jordan, Australia, Turkey, the Netherlands, Brazil, France …) and people from the project (in particular Gabor) go to events and talk to people in person regularly. And that makes a difference. A lot. I think I use Padre exactly because I met Gabor and Sebastian (sewi) last year at CeBIT and they got me interested again in that nice editor/IDE thing …

So guys, keep up the good work, both on the code and the community.

Calling arbitrary Java APIs from Perl? Sounds like a nice vision. I will definitely have a look at it.

Why is File::Slurp not part of the Perl core distribution? It is such a handy module.