New Awards “Fundamental” for Perl and “Slimline September”

by on September 16, 2026 at 5:53 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

I decided to go for the Slimline September award and started the Perl track on exercism.org. It strangely seemed like the least foreign programming language. It is probably the easiest to set up too.

Speaking of setup, I didn’t get it working right. There was a nice installer for the language itself, but the instructions for getting the packages working did not work, and my version was still older than what they wanted. I even tried on WSL, but that was no better. Eventually I decided I would just work in the online editor. I was only in it to collect the award, and don’t plan to finish it, so the online editor isn’t so bad.

I must say things like references and the type specifiers really threw me off in many ways over and over.

I did the first five exercises and I got …. nothing. I thought it was five exercises for the Slimline September award. After that I decided I had to do the five they wanted, but I was too unsure of the syntax to not bumble forward more until I felt ready. I only did one today and it took me a very long time because of those special type character combinations and references. I guess I really should have read an introduction to Perl or something.

On submitting the code for the sixth exercise however, something happened. I got my award anyway. I also got the Fundamental award for finishing the learning track. I guess the learning track is only five exercises (six if you count hello world). Maybe the Slimline award didn’t count hello world as a proper exercise. (I just checked and Hello World indeed doesn’t count.)

One of the things I noticed is that some of the strange syntax choices in PHP probably come from Perl. The leading $ on variable names for example.

Anyway, here are the awards.

January looks like a free-for all just do five exercises but I think I did far more than five Javascript exercises back in January and didn’t get an award. I don’t think they made a badge for January. Maybe I will count my New Years Resolution one for January. The rest of the months I haven’t done are (with probable picks in bold):

  • Functional February (Elixer, F#, or Clojure)
  • Mechanical March (C, C++, D, Go, Nim, Rust, V or Zig)
  • Mindshifting May (Ballerina, Pharo, Prolog, Red, Tcl (Tickle) or Unison)
  • Summer of Sexp [June] (Clojure, Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, Racket or Scheme)
  • Jurassic July (C, C++, COBOL, Fortran and Visual Basic)
  • Nibbly November (MIPS Assembly, x86-64 Assembly or WebAssembly)
  • December Diversions (ColdFusion, Groovy, Lua, VimScript or Wren)

Remind me if I forget.