# from David Cantrell
# on Thursday 09 April 2009 05:10:
>>>But, anyway, is it a problem we really need to be inflicting on new
>>> Perl users? Do they have to care if "somebody might be running
>>> 5.8.8 somewhere"? With 5.10.0 out for well over a year now?
>I care because ...
You don't exactly qualify as a "new user", though :-)
>A common plaint I hear about perl code *from people outside the
>community* is that we have too many dependencies and our code is too
>hard to install. ... If on top of that you want
> them to *upgrade perl* they're going to think you're mad.
Ruby didn't seem to have a problem getting installed.
>And we should care about people outside the community, because they
>vastly outnumber those of us *in* the community. They and their
>opinions are important because they do things like influence which
>technologies their employers use, and consequently how many jobs there
>are for us.
I've never heard "we don't use Perl because it's hard to install", I've
only heard "we can't find programmers".
The recommendations we make to new programmers are met with limited
patience. Do you recommend that they use EU::MM on account of
M::B "not working" on a system which hasn't been upgraded in 10 years?
IMO, that's getting off on the wrong foot for reasons which aren't
worth it. By the time you need to explain how to do something special
with EU::MM, you could easily explain the compatibility issues of M::B
and the boring history lesson (and if you've gotten that far, we've
passed "newbie".)
And for those who would recommend M::I, would you also explain the
pitfalls of that, or simply leave it as "what you don't know yet won't
hurt you yet"?
--Eric
--
perl -e 'srand; print join(" ",sort({rand() < 0.5}
qw(sometimes it is important to be consistent)));'
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