Why would the community not provide advice when I ask a question that is limited by an older Perl? While I have had people explicitly say they won't help because I'm not running a "supported" version, those people seem few and thankfully far between. Granted, there's a big difference between "must use print instead of say" and "we need the unicode support in version 5.XX". I completely agree that if I want something in 5.20 then gosh, I guess I'm using 5.20 or later.

Funny story: I was using an old OS based version of a language. Got a lot of flack for it and the whole "we won't support you" junk. I really liked the language, and started pulling daily dev builds. Even found and fixed a bug in the test suite. Then I'd get flack for using a version that was "too new." Can't please some people.

I haven't read "Modern Perl", but people whose opinion I trust recommend it. When a newbie asks about a good book, I'll recommend it. Vintage is nice in a car, great in a wine, but not so hot in a computer language. On the other hand, I'm finding "Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook" to be priceless.

For me, having to use older Perl with minimal CPAN has been a very good thing. I am pushed to actually learn how things work. I can build a robust and portable, if not fancy, codebase. My path isn't how everyone else gets here, I'm okay with that. A friend wants to build something with 5.20 and lots of CPAN; cool.

The path to learn is difficult enough. Pushing against learners because they use older tools just weakens the community. If they can learn enough then they'll move forward when it works best for them.