The next release of Perl will include a new style guide for its core documentation. In this talk, the guide's principal author discusses the motivations for this new "perldocstyle" man page, walks through its content, and outlines its role in Perl's future.
The next release of Perl will include a new man page named "perldocstyle": a style guide for the language's core documentation. Inspired by a call to action made by Sawyer X at 2019's TPC, the guide promotes documentation that centers approachability for new Perl programmers, while retaining the work's unique voice and its value as a history-steeped reference.
In this talk, the style guide's principal author, Jason McIntosh, discusses the history of the guide's creation, including the motivation that sparked it and the many contemporary projects and practices that helped inform it. Jason will walk the audience through the guide, exploring its content section-by-section: its fundamental concepts, its advice on formatting and structure, and its recommendations for tone, content, and overall organization.
Jason will also describe the guide's role as a founding document for Perl's new documentation team, and how it helps lay the groundwork for that team's initial projects and goals at the start of the Perl 7 era.
