For data, and even multimedia (I D/L and dont stream!)

I have learned all too well that what is on the net one day, may be gone the next. Here we even archive news articles to print->PDF or actual paper.

In Debian I have had some favorite apps deprecated and removed (but faithfully retaianed in my archives, plus mirror).

In Debian I have also been known to append the Site dirs of older Perl installs to the end of perlenv.

I dont write enterprise apps, just useful scripts for my systems and ecommerce website, and believe that if it works: DONT FIX IT. Even if its from 1998.

One of the nicer things with Perl, as opposed to Ruby/Python is the relative lack of versioning hell. Just update everything, and if necessary set the 'use' version at the top of the scripts/modules. There is no real downside to 'extra' modules. I use the notest pragma becuase the tests can be damn obscure, and in Win I fully realize that most scripts are written for Unix and make allowances accordingly. Even with MingW.

Its the relative 'freedoms' allowed with Perl that I simply dont migrate everything to Python, which is much easier to read and understand, though its a PITA with text from what I have seen. Nothing beats the $_ =~ s/foo(bar)/baz$1/ig 'sugar'.