[Israel.pm] Informal poll: Why are you (or your company) still using an older version of Perl?

[Gabor Szabo]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 4:31 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>
> I have an answer to an opposite question: Why don't *i* use perl
> *earlier* than 5.10? Because it has features that save me so much
> work, that i prefer to invest some time in upgrading and not to keep
> dabbling with the older style. It's enough to mention named capture
> and smart match. I don't know why some people think differently.
>

That's an interesting point something we need to stress more.
There are costs and risks involved with the upgrade of perl but there
are also costs and risks if you don't upgrade. Inspired by your comment
I tried to write them down on http://szabgab.com/blog/2009/10/1256905701.html

but here are the main points:

If you don't upgrade

- You won't get community support for it and even commercial support
will cost more
   than for a modern perl.
- Same with all the CPAN modules.

- Development time will be longer that with newer perl as you won't be
able to use
  the new features of perl and you won't be able to use many CPAN modules.
  (e.g. Moose and Devel::NYTProf need 5.8.1)

- Finding and retaining(!) *good* developers who want to work on code that is
  using 5.6.x or older will be harder than finding developers to write
  modern perl code.


any other ideas for reasons why to upgrade?

Gabor