I've moved away from Perl as a result of the underlying weaknesses which this issue uncovered for me.

The success (for me, my business) of Perl as a development platform is critical to the support available, the reliability of the modules and inherent in both those, the community (e.g. perlMonks).

For a long time, I not only enjoyed working in Perl, I really enjoyed being "part" (ok ... an "extra" of very small stature!) of the Perl community.

However, when I came across the above issue it showed that there are issues with reliability and documentation (support). To be honest I think I could have managed with both of those if it hadn't been the attitude of more "senior" members who displayed no willingness to deal with anomaly - or gave no direction on resolving it.

The fact that, 3 years later, this post is still being of some assistance/interest strongly supports this view.

In retrospect, I'd still be a perl advocate if it had panned out differently: e.g.

• problem highlighted
• source of issue identified
• minor tuition/wrist slap for me for hand-rolling
• update of module and/or documentation
• thread closed forever