use Perl

Slashdot syndrome: he read the title but not the article. The title makes it sound like you're trying to literally downgrade the system perl, but you of course understand how to use PREFIX to install alternative perls.

Thanks for writing this up, by the way: I've been trying to build an old perl, and I had pretty much blundered my way through to just before the last fix you have here-- and I was glad to see that you didn't understand where the problem came from either.

Even though it can be a little annoying to maintain the number (although updating this number sounds like a good feature for an editor to implement)

Funny, I just added a feature to do that for emacs, it's in the latest release of my perlnow.el.

If you run a *.t file from inside of emacs using perlnow.el, you can then do a "perlnow-revise-test-plan" which changes the plan to match the number of tests you actually ran.

I believe you're in the wrong line of work then. How would you even design such a study?

What I would do, is I would consult some social scientists. We are in the wrong line of work to be ruling out the possibility of doing an intelligent study of programming methodologies.

When I hear about a perl module doing something whizzy, the first thing I want to know is if it's using a source filter. On top of all the other complaints you usually hear, source filters, even if they work correctly make it a pain to step through your code using the perl debugger.

And Scott's main point here is that excessive dependencies can be a pain -- if installing Moose bugs you, then yeah, you want to know if you're installing something that uses Moose. (I used to think that deps were a non-issue now because we're all using CPAN.pm or CPANPLUS.pm to handle them automatically... I've gotten enough complaints to conclude that many people are still doing it manually.)