There are some good articles out recently on DarkPan, which talk about the problems the perl5 language has with legacy code. I won't re-post them here, but it's worth a read. http://perl-toddr.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-we-should-address-darkpan-problem.html http://perl-yarg.blogspot.com/2009/06/darkpan-schmarkpan-stop-meme.html