[ketzu]

This was quite interesting to look through!

Perl 5.8.0 is over 20 years old (https://dev.perl.org/perl5/news/2002/07/18/580ann/) while centOS 3.9 was released in 2007! At the same time it seems not-that-old and ancient.

My personal anecdote with gnu parallel was running into it while working in academia. It worked well and saved me some time, but I felt that it was unreasonable of a tool to ask for a citation to parallelise a script - it seemed that matplotlib, jupyter and co would need one as well. On the other hand, I decided to not use it, because I also feel that authors can ask for whatever they want.

[ajsnigrutin]

Yep, that's the great thing about perl... take a 20 year old script and it still works today. In comparison, if they used python, they'd be using python 2.2.

[fmajid]

That's basically a side-effect of Perl being a dead language, frozen because Perl 6 will never happen. It's surprisingly hard to eradicate, however.

[chungy]

Perl isn't dead, not by a long shot. Perl 6 happened too, and because compatibility was never even really a thought, renamed to Raku instead. There's been talks for a few years of finally bumping Perl's major version in order to change the defaults.

[VyseofArcadia]

There's value in stability, though.

Maybe it's not dead. Maybe it's just finished. Does everything need to keep changing? Change isn't always improvement, and even if it is, if you have to maintain backwards compatibility, sometimes the conceptual load of having to keep the old ways and the new ways in your head all the time isn't worth it.

Maybe we should start letting things just be finished.

[uhtred]

Perl 5 is actively developed still though, and presumable will become Perl 7 at some point.

Why does a language being stable mean it's dead? Is Awk dead?

[ajsnigrutin]

Not making breaking changes every few years doesn't mean that the language is dead. It's still being developed and new versions of perl are still coming out.

[attractivechaos]

> That's basically a side-effect of Perl being a dead language

Keeping long-term backward compatibility does not necessarily mean dying. C is 50 years old and still alive. I have written a lot more Perl than Python. IMHO, Perl is dying because its syntax is arcane and confusing. We can't solve this problem unless we design a brand new language.

[chubot]

Python 2.7 was released in 2010, and is even more frozen than Perl!

It still works, though you would have to archive/vendor dependencies

[Ferret7446]

It's a request, not a requirement. I see nothing wrong with the request nor if an individual decides to not cite it due to their principles/judgement.

[ketzu]

As I said, I think it is okay for authors to make any request they want, it is their software after all.

But I still think making citation for gnu parallel is unreasonable. There is a huge body of software, of which gnu parallel is probably the least important, that contributed to (at least my) research. Blowing up citation lists with those makes the citation list borderline useless.

It makes citations into advertising space for software - it's bad enough being coerced to make it an advertisement for reviewers papers.