Yes, this is why it's nice. You don't have to worship at the foot of an industry which slavishly tries to implement a misunderstanding of a system some dude made up 40 years ago to get around problems in other systems some other dudes made up before that. It's weird on purpose. And it's backwards-compatible-crufty on purpose.

Today I can run Perl code written two decades ago, but with the latest interpreter. I don't think any other interpreted language can do that, can they? (Bourne shell?)