Version of Perl I use, via @pinkopanterata
SoftwareI mentioned on The Bird Site last night that I still love Perl, which prompted @pinkopanterata to ask:
What version of Perl do you use?
Good question! I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this specifically, despite talking about camels here for years.
I’m still on Perl 5. I had fun exploring Raku, but Perl 5 still does everything I want, and uses that familiar syntax. I haven’t touched Perl 7 yet, but that’s on the personal project pile.
For the longest time I required Perl 5.16 as minimum in my scripts. This seminal version fixed a few longstanding Unicode bugs which made my life difficult in the past, and added a bunch of useful features like __SUB__. 5.16 incudes some hashing bugs though, so thesedays I set use 5.018 at minimum.
In terms of installation, I tend to be conservative and run whatever package managers include. My tools and code tend to be self-contained; I’m not running massive projects that require specific versions from CPAN, for example. I’ve also run Perl from pkgsrc on Debian in the past, because I was already using it for other things.
That said, I use the excellent Perlbrew system on my personal machines because I always want to try the latest goodies.
