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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

Perl has retained stable backwards compatibility and no breaking changes for 20+ years. What's wrong with Perl?

Lots of unstable breakages over the last year's. automake got broken by an unnecessary deprecation, signatures got broken, encodings, and dozens more.

but still miles better than other such languages, and esp. if it would have been written in C, just as the incompatible moreutils counterpart.

I was curious how much breakage GNU Parallel has suffered. So I fetched all versions (in parallel) and ran:

    parallel -k --tag --argsep -- {} echo ::: 1 -- parallel-*

Every version since 20120622 work (except for 20121022). That is code which is almost 10 years old.

you need to try with all the perl versions, not the parallel versions.

In my anecdotal, n=1 experience, nothing Perl-based I've ever used has EVER broken over 20+ years, not even ONCE.

Compare this with PHP, whose breaking changes between releases has taken down my sites on multiple occasions.

Compare this with Python, whose breaking changes prevent me from running the overwhelming majority of Python things I've tried to use.

> signatures got broken

Subroutine signatures are an experimental feature in Perl. Or are you referring to something else?

"perl has common-lisp levels of stability"

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