> trying to guarantee backwards compat for all the legacy code
Not "all", as there are indeed deprecations added over time, but _most_.
I really, really like that I can, more often than not, take a program I wrote decades ago and it will still run properly.
There's https://metacpan.org/dist/perl/view/pod/perlclass.pod, which (granted) is experimental, but it's actively being worked on.
> Still no working exception handling!
There's https://metacpan.org/dist/perl/view/pod/perlsyn.pod#Try-Catc... which is now (5.40) no longer an experiment, _aside from_ the use of `finally`, which warns.
> trying to guarantee backwards compat for all the legacy code
Not "all", as there are indeed deprecations added over time, but _most_. I really, really like that I can, more often than not, take a program I wrote decades ago and it will still run properly.