What’s so great about CPAN anyway?
adamjctaylor.com
What’s so great about CPAN anyway?
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: What’s so great about CPAN anyway?
#2I don't know. For a Perl hacker this is rather boring, can it convince someone new to Perl?
Re: What’s so great about CPAN anyway?
#3I don't know. For a Perl hacker this is rather boring, can it convince someone new to Perl?
I think new hackers could be easily drawn into using Perl simply because of the breadth of tools available in CPAN. Chances are whatever you need to do, someone has written a module for it. Why roll your own when there's a stable module?
Of course the new user may quickly run into CPAN dependency hell, but that's a different issue.
Re: What’s so great about CPAN anyway?
#4I don't know. For a Perl hacker this is rather boring, can it convince someone new to Perl?
I think new hackers could be easily drawn into using Perl simply because of the breadth of tools available in CPAN. Chances are whatever you need to do, someone has written a module for it. Why roll your own when there's a stable module? Of course the new user may quickly run into CPAN dependency hell, but that's a different issue.
Of which 50% are abandoned and 25% are alpha. And 12% are duplicates and you need to decide which to use. At least that was the state in the 90s when all I did was Perl. [Fixed some English]
Re: What’s so great about CPAN anyway?
#5I don't know. For a Perl hacker this is rather boring, can it convince someone new to Perl?
I think new hackers could be easily drawn into using Perl simply because of the breadth of tools available in CPAN. Chances are whatever you need to do, someone has written a module for it. Why roll your own when there's a stable module? Of course the new user may quickly run into CPAN dependency hell, but that's a different issue.
Chances are whatever you need to do, someone has written a module for it
This used to be a big argument for Perl 10-12 years ago when I was actively working in Perl, and one of the things I kind of missed when I first switched to python. However I've found that many languages have caught up with (and in some areas surpassed) Perl in this regard over the past decade. What CPAN libraries are there today that are class leading and for which no reasonable equivalent exist for other languages?
Re: What’s so great about CPAN anyway?
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think new hackers could be easily drawn into using Perl simply because of the breadth of tools available in CPAN. Chances are whatever you need to do, someone has written a module for it. Why roll your own when there's a stable module? Of course the new user may quickly run into CPAN dependency hell, but that's a different issue.
Of which 50% are abandoned and 25% are alpha. And 12% are duplicates and you need to decide which to use. At least that was the state in the 90s when all I did was Perl. [Fixed some English]
Still the same. Also, few people look at bugs reported via cpan. I never got a response to any of mine. At least you can see some packages going red on more and more systems, so it's quite easy to spot the useless/unmaintained ones.
True regarding duplication - if I had a penny for every new incomplete logging framework uploaded to CPAN, I'd be a rich man...
Re: What’s so great about CPAN anyway?
#7I use Perl every day in product/home and have contributed numerous modules on CPAN. The "Ratings" argument is very very thin. Yes, CPAN does have a ratings system ; nobody uses it. Even very very popular and well-written modules, for example Data::Dumper, have below 10 ratings.
Re: What’s so great about CPAN anyway?
#8I use Perl every day in product/home and have contributed numerous modules on CPAN. The "Ratings" argument is very very thin. Yes, CPAN does have a ratings system ; nobody uses it. Even very very popular and well-written modules, for example Data::Dumper, have below 10 ratings.
But Data::Dumper is a core module, so that's a bit of a special case as far as CPAN ratings goes.
Re: What’s so great about CPAN anyway?
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of which 50% are abandoned and 25% are alpha. And 12% are duplicates and you need to decide which to use. At least that was the state in the 90s when all I did was Perl. [Fixed some English]
Still the same. Also, few people look at bugs reported via cpan. I never got a response to any of mine. At least you can see some packages going red on more and more systems, so it's quite easy to spot the useless/unmaintained ones. True regarding duplication - if I had a penny for every new incomplete logging framework uploaded to CPAN, I'd be a rich man...
No, people stopped writing logging frameworks years ago. Even Log4Perl and Log::Dispatch interoperate now. The cool new thing is web frameworks. But of course, due to PSGI, those all work together too! "There's more than one way to do it", but at least you can deploy them all to production in the same way.
As for bugs; trust me, people reply to them. Take a look at how many Moose bugs are "resolved", for example: https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Status=Resolved.... That's a lot more than "never".
Re: What’s so great about CPAN anyway?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think new hackers could be easily drawn into using Perl simply because of the breadth of tools available in CPAN. Chances are whatever you need to do, someone has written a module for it. Why roll your own when there's a stable module? Of course the new user may quickly run into CPAN dependency hell, but that's a different issue.
Of which 50% are abandoned and 25% are alpha. And 12% are duplicates and you need to decide which to use. At least that was the state in the 90s when all I did was Perl. [Fixed some English]
The irony is that even in environments like Java and .NET, where, in theory, one person makes all the decisions with respect to what libraries to include, there are 50% deprecated classes, 25% that don't work, and 12% are duplicates and you need to decide what to use. I don't think I've ever written a Java app where 90% of the libraries I wanted to use have been deprecated in favor of AbstractSimpleTaskFactoryConfiguratorInterfaceThreePointOh.
This is a programmer problem, not a Perl problem. What's great about Perl is that you are forced to use very few of these modules, so you can ignore the bloat once you've made your own decisions. Worse comes to worst, and someone rewrites some module you use and you get new features for free. I don't get all the complaining.