> My experience with Perl is that often the batteries are rotting. I think the batteries metaphor was meant to refer to the std lib, or (for Perl) the "CPAN" m

> My experience with Perl is that often the batteries are rotting. I think the batteries metaphor was meant to refer to the std lib, or (for Perl) the "CPAN" modules that are part of the core. The Perl core always keeps those batteries charged because they can't do a release if any of those are dead. They even ejected problematic modules, or those that were long since defunct, from the core so they don't have to deal with them. Python went through this exercise as well: https://peps.python.org/pep-0594/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0594/ The core Perl devs will also go to great effort to test against the entirety of CPAN ("blead breaks CPAN" testing), but some of those distributions haven't been maintained in decades so they have to draw the line somewhere. Fortunately if it's on CPAN then it's forkable (for the most part) so someone can take up maintenance.