Post #4096432
2026-07-25 19:45 UTC
I've toyed with the idea of refreshing my knowledge of Perl. Nearly all the jobs I apply for ask for knowledge of BASH, Python, and occasionally Powershell; I haven't seen a job listing mention Perl in years. Still, it does seem to continue to be under development.
A conceptual problem I have with Perl best practices is that there's a lot of emphasis on writing Perl code that's compatible with old versions of the Perl interpreter. But of course, that means not using newer functionality.
I've thought the reasonable thing to do would be to write code based on the oldest version of Perl installed on systems I'm supporting on a job.
Is that a reasonable approach?
#Perl
Replies (1)
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@barubary@infosec.exchange 2026-07-25 20:23
@foolishowl@social.coop Sounds reasonable to me. For private stuff I generally use v5.36 at minimum, plus whatever newer features I find convenient. For things I publish I tend to be more conservative, but I don't go out of my way to stay compatible with a 10 year old version of perl. If things happen to work, great; if not, no big deal. (Also, writing for anything before v5.20 is pointless unless you have some ancient systems you absolutely must support.)