Some time ago chromatic wrote about Modern Perl. I thought it to be a neat idea but did not follow up. Based on the first post I thought it is mostly about the use of high powered advanced features while now reading some of the comments I understand that at least in part Modern Perl is about helping beginners. That's much more interesting to me as I feel I understand that part more. So today I looked at some of the discussion on use.perl.org and on the web site of Modern Perl Books. As I can understand there is a CPAN module called Modern::Perl that would enable strict, warnings and the features of perl 5.10. I agree with the former two but unfortunately I still have an issue with 5.10. That's probably the main difference between Modern Perl and plain Perl for Beginners. The former can demand 5.10 on both the development and production machines, the latter has to live with whatever installed on the machines of the corporations. Luckily in the past 2 years I have hardly seen any perl older than 5.6.0 at my clients but many are still stuck with 5.6 and nearly none of them made the change to 5.10. I can only assume that it is similar in the other parts of the world. That means if I want to give them good service I have to teach them something that will work on 5.6 or at least on 5.8. That still gives plenty of improvements over most of the code out there in the direction of Modern Perl but it is a different type of beast.