Perl Developers Actively Care About Backwards Compatibility

http://consttype.blogspot.com/2009/07/darkpan-matters.html

by acqq • 16 years ago

24 9 16 years ago

consttype.blogspot.com

acqq3• 16 years ago

Perl 5 was released in 1994. The current production version of Perl is 5.12. You can really consider Perl 5 as something very, very stable by now.

Goladus• 16 years ago

The difficulty maintaining Perl comes from the large number of modules that will only work with the perl version it was compiled with. A module might work with any version 5.8 or later, but only one version at a time. So if you upgrade perl on a system, you'll have to re-install the module from CPAN as well.

chromatic2• 16 years ago

You mean XS modules, and any well-written XS module should be binary compatible with any other point release. That is to say, if you compiled an XS module against Perl 5.10, it should work unchanged with Perl 5.10.1.

talvisota• 16 years ago

The article to which this one is a response, has exactly the opposite point of view:

http://perl-yarg.blogspot.com/2009/06/darkpan-schmarkpan-sto...

As, to some extent, does a followup from another developer:

http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/39228?from=rss

I suggest an alternative title for this post: "Some Perl Developers Care About Backwards Compatibility (While Some Don't Give A Hoot And Others Just Try To Keep Up With Conflicting Needs)".

acqq3• 16 years ago

There's big difference: those who care actually develop Perl (like, they maintain the C kernel of the language etc.), and those that don't just use Perl and just make noise and are clueless outsiders looking for attention.

Edit: I don't count as outsiders or anything anybody who is a Perl contributor and has his own opinion! Not everybody is supposed to have same opinion, and even when people do cooperate it's a part of the process! My personal belief is still that Perl 5 aged more gracefully than a lot of projects!

chromatic2• 16 years ago

That's... quite a claim. I'm hardly the only contributor to Perl 5 who thinks that the obsession over backwards compatibility with an unknowable and unmeasureable DarkPAN is unhealthy.

jleader2• 16 years ago

I'd characterize these posts as "Last year, Perl developers and users debated the relative merits of backwards compatibility vs. innovation". All of the participants care about backwards compatibility, just to differing degrees. Keep in mind, Perl had just had its first major release in 5 years, and was starting to have more frequent major releases; there's been lots of discussion of how Perl should evolve.

Another long thread discussing the same question: http://use.perl.org/~educated_foo/journal/38525

Perl Developers Actively Care About Backwards Compatibility

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