Ovid:

Again, if you have to remember to do a particular thing to get benefits, it hurts the Perl community. For example, use strict; use warnings; should have been the default a long time ago, with additional action taken to disable them.
So, Joe SysAdmin does an upgrade one day, and finds half of the old perl scripts on the system are broken. This is not something you want to have happen, not when we're still fighting the fallout from the "perl is dead" smear campaign.

I could see an argument that stuff like "use 5.10.0" should've implied strict and warnings also... or for that matter that cromatic's Modern::Perl should ship with the core library, it's a lot easier to type correctly (I had to double-check that you really need "5.10.0").

Backwards compatibility is really and truly important, and it remains important-- it's one of the things that perl has always gotten right (and the new kids keep screwing up).

In reply to Re^3: Recap: The Future of Perl 5 by doom
in thread Recap: The Future of Perl 5 by Ovid

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