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

[guy keren]

i have a different question: why do you care?

there are reasons for people to use the older software for any software 
X you'll mention - you operating systems, office suites, programming 
languages/compilers, external libraries etc. etc. etc.

what is the point of pushing people? this sounds like the method of 
commercial companies - they want to sell the upgrades. what do you want 
to sell - course-grades?

the basic idea of open source is to give the power to the users - 
including the power to stay with an older version of software if and 
when they see fit.

if there was an assured (QA-wise) upgrade process that never broke 
things and was trusted by people - people might have considered these 
upgrades with a more favore. as long as this process has its cons - 
you'll have people that will simply refuse to upgrade until they have no 
choice - and sometimes even then.

--guy

Gabor Szabo wrote:
> 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
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