Maybe I'll get down voted but I really think perl 4.036 was the best perl. It wa...

raiph · on Sept 9, 2015

It's quite possible that Larry agrees with you.

I've never heard him suggest that it was a mistake to build on Perl 4 to get to Perl 5. Which implies that he considered it worth A) continuing to evolve Perl and B) building directly on the language design and implementation of Perl 4. But aiui, when the mug smashed in 2000, he quite literally instantly seized on the notion of more or less starting over in regard to language design, compiler implementation (and, very importantly, the cultural vibe), for Perl 6.

Diederich · on Sept 10, 2015

Perl4 was my first Perl. I was a hard-core C programmer at the time, and Perl4 was just seriously fun.

By the way, I think most Perl4 programs will run on the latest Perl 5. So, feel free to roll with Perl4!

raiph · on Sept 11, 2015

> I think most Perl4 programs will run on the latest Perl 5.

I think most programs that will run on the latest Perl 5 will run on the latest Perl 6.[1]

So, yeah, feel free to roll with Perl4 and maybe mix it up with a little Perl 6 magic (eg concurrency or Unicode grapheme string handling).

[1] https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5/