eh, from a sysadmin perspective, the real advantage is that perl5 is perl5 and it has been essentially the same for what, 10 years now? If you are stuck on a R

eh, from a sysadmin perspective, the real advantage is that perl5 is perl5 and it has been essentially the same for what, 10 years now? If you are stuck on a RHEL system (or anywhere else where you expect the server to remain up without major revisions for 3-5 years) maintaining the two or three versions of your scripting language is a pain in the ass. (yes, you have to do this on RHEL 5 if you support python, usually. the base system requires a pretty old python runtime, so you need another if you want the new stuff.) I remember working on perl when you still needed to keep both perl4 and perl5 around on a system... today, though, perl5 is the scripting language you can depend on having, that you can depend on being there and compatible. This is also the major resistance to perl6. Goddamnit, perl5 works. I don't want to go back to the bad old days when i had to write everything in sh (or test it across two major revs of perl) if I wanted it to run properly on all systems. I know that the language writers always claim backwards compatibility is a priority, and it is, kindof, but, for example, don't try to upgrade the base python on a RHEL5 system. you /can/ but it's a /huge/ pain in the ass and it means you will have to do more work every time yum or some other python-dependent base bit is upgraded. for us, perl occupies the niche that bash occupied in 1997. Now, it /can/ do more, but we are utterly dependent, at this point, on the bash replacement.