In a +1 score to #Perl's great back-compatibility, I've had a script called from procmail that's been 100% reliable for the past 15 years maintaining my email, over many years of regular Perl updates.
@leonerd the only personal application i've written to make it to version 1.0 and see distribution was written in perl. i picked perl because i know i won't have to spend the rest of my life keeping track of dependencies.
folks don't realize perl is the duct tape holding the internet together.
@leonerd There is a meltdown in the bioinformatics community about #python now for the same reasons. The stuff I wrote 20+ years ago for my PhD in #Perl & #swig still work (after installing a modern version of PerlMagick)
@pjakobs Yeah I get that. People ask me what is the Perl equivalent of pyenv, and I ask what it does, and they explain and then I wonder "Uhm, I don't know, I've never felt a need to have that in Perl".
They wonder how I maintain different versions of Perl for different things and I say "I dunno, I just use latest for everything and it all works fine". I get these sortof blank stares of disbelief.
@pjakobs I mainly manage different #Perl versions with #asdf (https://asdf-vm.com) to test code that has to run in less upgradeable environments elsewhere. $work, for example, susbscribes to #Canonical's #Ubuntu Pro so we're on Perl v5.34.0 of their 22.04 LTS #Linux distribution (“#Jammy Jellyfish”).
But like @leonerd, personal stuff is on the latest.
@mjgardner@ChristosArgyrop@leonerd@pjakobs I use plenv in my development environments, and whenever I have a machine that has the misfortune of me being its admin. I specifically use plenv because it supports the .perl-version file so I can commit that to the repo.
I also heavily use Carton so all my libraries are installed in a local/ directory.
My production environment is containerized so I used the perl:latest Docker image.
@mjgardner@ChristosArgyrop@leonerd@pjakobs Also one of the great benefits of my current employment situations is that my production is not only using 5.38 but it’s using feature class extensively.
@leonerd@pjakobs to be honest I think the pyenv users are crazy. I've been developing in Python for 20 years and I've never used it.
Migrating from Python 2 to Python 3 did break a lot of stuff, but aside from that I seldom have a problem. I suppose third party libraries do sometimes break things, but that's not really Python's fault.
I think the problem stems from the over-introduction of dependencies. I blame java & typescript devs for that culture.
@mcgrew@leonerd@pjakobs Python updates are probably the most painful thing about maintaining linux systems, even minor point releases tend to make everything incompatible and require waiting for software updates, so you end up with nonsense like having 5 different python environments to support different system tools because of breaking changes requiring rewrites even in point releases. Major distros "hide" this problem from you but it's BAD with python.
@leonerd@pjakobs I'm an old 90s/2000s Perl programmer. Since then I've come to like Python /as a language/ better and that now accounts for about 90% of my coding, but it can't be ignored that there are some Perl scripts I wrote literally 20 years ago are still running unmodified on modern Perl.
@leonerd@pjakobs That time I dug out a perl script I wrote 25 years ago and haven't touched since, ran it on some historical data with the current version of perl, and it just worked: https://jwz.org/b/yj88
@Sdowney@jwz@pjakobs Yeah; that whole "Perl 6" distraction was unfortunate, yes. That particular project has now been renamed Raku thus leaving Perl a clear runway to bump the version number up to 7 and onwards someday, so it's at least fixed now.
Though sure that reputation still hangs around far longer... Not a lot we can do about that, besides trying to override it with more positive noises now.
@leonerd@jwz@pjakobs it did have the benefit of keeping all of the people who wanted to make breaking changes occupied, leaving those who wanted to get work done a stable platform to do so with.
@Sdowney@jwz@pjakobs A charitable way to consider it, is that it split the group into "make new thing" and "keep existing thing" camps.
In reality I fear the outcome was more that it also created a third camp of "screw this I'm off elsewhere", and a lot of otherwise-good devs just disappeared.
It's certainly a regrettable part of history I wish had not happened. But then you can say that of a lot of historical happenings ;)
@leonerd@Sdowney@pjakobs Yes, exactly! Perl 6 was a perfect honeypot to get those people out of the way. It was the Golgafrincham B Ark of language design. Look, over here, shiiiiiiny.
@pjakobs@jwz@leonerd@Sdowney I think it’s charitable to the #Perl 6 splitters. The Golgafrinchan Ark B group in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was mostly harmless 😉 (and useless); the #Perl6 effort was, at best, neglecting #Perl5 compatibility, and at worst, actively throwing bombs at it.
@Sdowney@pjakobs@jwz@leonerd If the human race succumbs to extinction via dirty telephone handsets due to a lack of twigils and hyper operators, we will have deserved it.
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