As the author of this post points out, there have been about twenty releases since Perl 5.6, when the book was published. Features like the "switch" and "state" keywords have been introduced. If you look away too quickly, another database interface crops up, or people are doing objects differently. Perl changes so often that writing about it is like trapping a unicorn.
It's impressive that users of a 25-year-old language are not afraid to improve upon it (with the caveat that it stays backwards compatible). But since I started using $OTHER_LANGUAGE I don't have to worry about keeping up to date because language features change twice a decade.
That's a terrible straw man. Everything changes. Javascript is morphing into this weird "Coffee" thing before our eyes. Python pushed a completely new language and is currently supporting two of them. Even python 2.6 looks absolutely nothing like 2.0. People fled whole-hog from perl and python to ruby (another hardly static language) a few years ago, and most of those same people are now retraining their brains on that JavaCoffee thing I mentioned.
C++? Yeah, brand new version out with whole new metaphors (An... rvalue reference?! And what is that -> operator doing there?).
If you want compatibility, you have it. 15 year old perl scripts run fine on 5.14. If you want the community to not invent new stuff... dig yourself a hole I guess.
Perl changes so often that writing about it is like trapping a unicorn.
Not really. I document things with staying power. For example, I documented only the parts of smart match that are easy to explain. Everything else is up for debate, and thus not really worth recommending. (Besides, I'm not trying to replace the documentation.)
Yes, I'm so happy that Java, er, $OTHER_LANGUAGE, changes so (incredibly) slowly :-)
Perhaps there is a happy medium somewhere between these extremes, though.
(there seems to be just a bit of sarcasm in the above post, though -- writing about the moving Perl target is hard, but having a non-moving base one is employed to build on has its own "joys", as well)
As the author of this post points out, there have been about twenty releases since Perl 5.6, when the book was published. Features like the "switch" and "state" keywords have been introduced. If you look away too quickly, another database interface crops up, or people are doing objects differently. Perl changes so often that writing about it is like trapping a unicorn.
It's impressive that users of a 25-year-old language are not afraid to improve upon it (with the caveat that it stays backwards compatible). But since I started using $OTHER_LANGUAGE I don't have to worry about keeping up to date because language features change twice a decade.