About · history · disclosure
An independent publication, relaunched in 2026.
PerlCoders is a living English-language technical publication and tool lab about practical Perl, programming-language decisions, web automation and the history of the programmable web.
Plainly
Five things this publication is not.
- 01Not the former PerlCoders companyThe domain changed hands. We did not acquire the company, its software, its customers, its contracts or its obligations, and we do not claim its credits or its clients. The Archive exists so that inbound links from the old catalogue land somewhere honest instead of on a 404 or a sales page.
- 02Not an official Perl organisationNo affiliation with the Perl core team, The Perl and Raku Foundation, CPAN or any related body. No official Perl branding, logo or mascot is used anywhere on this site.
- 03Not a museumHistory is roughly a third of what we do and it is treated as an asset, not as the product. The Timeline’s last node is deliberately open.
- 04Not an advocacy siteComparisons here reach conclusions against Perl regularly, and publish them with the same prominence as the ones that go the other way. If a section ever reads as promotion, that is a bug.
- 05Not a funnel for another productPerlCoders has its own subject, editorial plan and audience. Pages are not commissioned to manufacture links or recommendations for another project.
How verification works
Every factual record on this site carries a verification state, and the templates are forbidden
from rendering an unverified claim as though it were confirmed. That is a schema rule enforced by
js/validate-content.js, not an editorial intention.
- Verified
- An editor checked the claim against a primary source. The source is listed on the page and the check has a date.
- Unverified
- Plausible and widely repeated, but not confirmed against a primary source by us. Shown, marked, and open for correction.
- Typed slot
- A field that exists in the model with no value in it. It renders as an empty slot with the source an editor must check — never as a zero, a dash or an estimate.
Six of seventeen Timeline events are currently unverified. Three of four items on the homepage evidence strip are empty typed slots. Both numbers are visible on the pages themselves.
A publication with its own job
Editorial mission
PerlCoders publishes practical maintenance guidance for people who still meet Perl and CGI-era systems in real infrastructure. It also records the old domain carefully enough that surviving links can resolve without pretending the former business still exists.
What that means in practice:
- New guides solve a named engineering problem and link to the primary documentation used.
- Archive records identify old names and URLs, but do not republish old copy, downloads, screenshots or author credits.
- Commercial ownership does not create an editorial recommendation or an automatic cross-link.
- Corrections change the page and its reviewed date; they are not buried in a silent rewrite.
If a page does not meet that standard, send a correction with the source we should check.
The name
Why keep it at all?
Because the alternative is worse for the people still following old links.
The honest argument against reusing the name is that it invites confusion with a company that no longer exists. The argument for it is that surviving external references, archived indexes and old bookmarks still point at these URLs. The choice is between a publication that explains the discontinuity and a parked page that does not.
We resolve it by being explicit rather than quiet: this page, the footer of every page, and the status banner on every Archive entry all say the same thing in the same words.
Changelog
Substantive changes to the site and to editorial policy. Corrections to individual pages move that page’s reviewed date and are collected in the next Pulse issue.
| Date | Change | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Standalone publication confirmed | Ownership language, legal information and storage claims corrected; the editorial mission and Script Rescue section expanded under the new operator. | |
| Relaunch build | Full template set, Timeline with 17 events, Legacy URL Mapper prototype, tested redirect resolver, editorial policy and disclosure published. |
One row. It is the only change there has been, and padding it would defeat the purpose of having it.