http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=393453


in reply to Use of 'our' considered harmful

A better paraphrase should probably be "Don't use something new and trendy, because it's new and trendy".

Sometimes you need to use a new feature, but often there is a more legacy friendly solution. I believe that the use of "our" has been complained about before, there are plenty of modules on CPAN that use "our" when they don't need to, and that does cause lot of pain to users of older Perls.

I make no comment about the point at which older versions of Perl are considered too old to be used or supported.


--
ajt

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Re^2: Use of 'our' considered harmful
by DrHyde (Prior) on Sep 24, 2004 at 12:56 UTC
    Bingo! I've not got a problem with people using (eg) Unicode-friendly features (#include rant about utf-*) if they need them. But no-one has a need for our that I can see.

    Brother Juerd said further up the thread that maybe this should be about five year old versions of perl being considered harmful. Sorry Brother, but I just don't see that. This 'ere machine, which I installed not three months ago, has a *ten* year old version of awk and a six year old sed. I use those most days. There's no need to upgrade. Many users don't see why they should upgrade perl when their perl is only half that age. They consider such a moving target to indicate a certain immaturity in perl.

      You might very well like and use a hammer your father bought thirty years ago, you'd probably not like a TV he bought at the same time nearly as much. Simple things do not age/evolve as quickly as the complex ones.

      Jenda
      Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
         -- Rick Osborne

      If evolving can be considered synomymous with immature, you are right. AWK is an old (and comparatively small) language frozen in time, so it's not surprising that the 10-year old interpreters work perfectly well. Perl is always experimenting, which I agree is problematic from a systems administrator's point of view. And since many sysadmins don't care about upgrading perl, I often end up having my own version on my ~/bin directories...