When people like Tim Bunce accept patches to make their code work on 5.6.2, that is the difference, in some companies, between "of course perl can work with databases" and "perl is a useless piece of hacker shit that can't even talk to a database, let's use Java".

I'm not saying that you *must* make your code backward compatible - as you quite rightly point out, I ain't paying you so have no say in how you spend your time. But it would be nice if you did.

And as for how old perl 5.6 is - hands up who's using the even more ancient C and SQL standards. Mature languages don't normally go adding new and pointless features - like 'our' and three-arg open - willy-nilly, and in my opinion mature programmers won't go using them without giving serious thought to the ramifications.


In reply to Re^2: The need and the price of running on old versions of Perl by DrHyde
in thread The need and the price of running on old versions of Perl by szabgab

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