use Perl

• When does it stop? (Score:2)

  by djberg96 (2603)

  With the development of Perl 6 underway, at what point does development on Perl 5.x stop? Just curious.
  • When it stops scratching someone's itch. (Score:2)

    by jmm (276) <johnNO@SPAMperlwolf.com> on 2004.02.25 10:27 (#28772) Journal

    The Nordic Perl Workshop announcement notes that there will be 4 pumpkings in attendance. There are pumpkings for multiple versions of Perl 5 - often people want to upgrade with bug fixes but avoid any significant changes, so there is ongoing support for many older versions at once.

    When Perl 6 comes out, it will attract an audience very quickly, but established applications will continue to run on their current platforms for a long time.

    While it's easy to write new code in the latest version of the language, or to convert a small number of small existing programs to accomdate the generally very small affects of an upgrade; there are many large applications that are working just fine and for which upgrading to a newer version would be a significant amount of work with little gain.

    Most of the work would be in setting up an all-inclusive test environment and verifying that everything still works. That large amout of work generally results in discovering that yes indeed, almost everything still works just fine, and only a small amount of work is needed to fix the things that don't. It's that difference between the large amount of work required to validate that makes it quite reasonable to postpone and limit upgrading the underlying version.

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    • Re:When it stops scratching someone's itch. (Score:2)

      by rafael (2125)

      'xactly. Perl 5 is not quite dead yet. And that's largely due to the fact that Perl 6 is not Perl 5-compatible: contrary to what happened with the upgrade Perl 4 to Perl 5 (mostly).