Ask HN: Has perl been making programmers carefree?

[karthik248]

Here's the story, I am a new perl programmer and happen to know a few experienced ones in person. I have observed that perl programmers are very carefree with environment setup, and very little cautious about the OS env. They keep saying, a code written in a one configuration of perl and packages should work in another configuration. As I happen to be a very cautious person, I find this mindset very uncomfortable. Am I the being overly cautious?

[vgy7ujm]

I think maybe what you see is a result of Perl actually being very backwards compatible and that maintainers of both Perl and important modules like web frameworks are working hard to make sure that we as users of the language can be a little "carefree" since it "just works" unlike many other languages.

With that said I think that seasoned Perl folks that also has experience running critical applications are usually more cautious and have a better understanding of the OS env and network than most application programmers from many other languages. Perl is after all very unixy.

[singingfish]

About 10 years ago, we (and by we I mean I was mostly watching) to make setting up perl environments much easier than it was. Which ended up with tools like local::lib, perlbrew, plenv, cpanm and so on coming to dominate.

So for me now it's super-easy to write code that will probably work on most OSs, and where rebuilding stuff for newer perls/OSs is pretty simple.

Cpantesters and the like really helps with this.