> I remain unconvinced. Should the amount of effort that it costs to update the interpreter really be the main consideration? No, it shouldnt. But it's a proxy

> I remain unconvinced. Should the amount of effort that it costs to update the interpreter really be the main consideration? No, it shouldnt. But it's a proxy measure for the engineering and productisation effort which goes in. It's relatively easy to get features in quickly with breakage. It's easy to have stability with no change. It's relatively hard to continuously improve with good reliability and back-compat. Perl was a major leader for automated testing since before TDD was a buzzword. Modern perl is a cool language with a great OO model and a shitty threading system (seriously, use multiproc if you want concurrency or just go async with one of the eventing systems). It has some serious warts (no implicit deref of references, the scalar/list context is arguably more trouble that it's worth) and suffers from an image problem. But it's a bulletproof, fast, widely deployed, portable, actively improving scripting language which doesn't have a lot of the warts of it's competitors (broken lexical scoping, problematic object model, poor performance etc). Oh "and CPAN" (ObMention)