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in reply to Re: Curious about Perl's strengths in 2018
in thread Curious about Perl's strengths in 2018

That false god of antiquity, namely 'backward compatibility', has been deemed all-powerful and sacrosanct, by the anointed -- for the most part by virtue of being around at the time -- few, with the result that even fixes aren't allowed to break even the most broken and ill-designed of existing 'working code'. The result is inevitable: stagnation.
I fully agree with this. IMHO, backward compatibility is usually a very good idea, but it becomes an obstacle to progress when it is maintained for too many years. We're speaking here about more than three decades. Nowadays, we really should no longer insist on keeping compatibility with Perl 4 programs written 25++ years ago. Strictures, warnings, lexical scope, lexical filehandles, autodie (or, at the very least least, autodie qw(open close)), and other such 'modern' features, should be the standard Perl behavior today, while keeping the no pragma_xxx possibility for programs written in the old style.

Perl 6 is a bold attempt to do that. I know that many people here tend to frown upon it because they think it is breaking too much the backward compatibility. "Gosh, it took me so long to learn the sigil change when accessing an individual item in an array or a hash;" I can readily understand this point of view; very often, when I started to use it, I asked myself: "Damned, why did they change that (specific feature)? It worked well without that change." Well, maybe Perl 6 changed too many things. Or maybe not. It is very hard to say what the optimal amount of change might have been. So, in brief, I can understand this reaction very well, but I think it is wrong: after having used Perl 6 for quite a few years by now, I know that these changes do make sense and really make the language much more consistent. And, frankly, Perl 6 is really easy to learn for an old Perl 5 user like me (who is still using Perl 5 almost everyday at work and loves to do so).