No, it's completely different. The newer Perl versions correctly continued to execute the old but already working scripts.
The Python mess was, IMO, a typical example of bureaucracy inventing for itself new but previously unnecessary work to justify its existence, so I agree that that the decisions of how to introduce Py3 features caused (and still cause) waste of immense amount of the hours world-wide that could have been used more productively. Sad.
> No, it's completely different. The newer Perl versions correctly continued to execute the old but already working scripts.
There was some breakage between 5.6, 5.8, and 5.10; Unicode is hard, and it takes time to get it right. But I think the key difference I've heard as a mostly python avoider is the intent was for code written for 5.6 to probably work in 5.8 and 5.10 and if it doesn't, for there to be a way to have one file that works for all versions.
From what I understand, it's not easy to have a python module/script that works in 2 and 3, and you can't go to 3 unless your dependencies do, so if you have a lot of dependencies (as is modern), you're stuck on 2. Your dependencies won't want to move to 3 either, because their users are stuck on 2, so if they just switch to 3, they're droping users; instead they need to support two parallel versions of their code. Most perl modules didn't have to do anything special to support 5.6 and 5.8, but if they did, it was usually small and it could be done within the file with conditional compilation --- I don't think that was an option for python.
For sure. I'd argue it was debatable to even "normalizing" all the built in packages to be consistent.
I think very few people had trouble remembering them, and if you're using one, you'll be looking up documentation for anything with more than a few methods.
It really is frustrating in these situations with high level languages. It's super possible to do the majority of changes they did in non breaking ways.
Hell, they do it already with the __future__ package. Where did all that compatibility work go in python3?
The Python mess was, IMO, a typical example of bureaucracy inventing for itself new but previously unnecessary work to justify its existence, so I agree that that the decisions of how to introduce Py3 features caused (and still cause) waste of immense amount of the hours world-wide that could have been used more productively. Sad.