

What’s so great about CPAN anyway? - Inversechi
http://www.adamjctaylor.com/whats-so-great-about-cpan-anyway

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ffffruit
I 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.

~~~
jrockway
But Data::Dumper is a core module, so that's a bit of a special case as far as
CPAN ratings goes.

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sigzero
There is a new release candidate for CPAN that sets up some very nice defaults
for using CPAN:

[http://www.dagolden.com/index.php/1339/cpan-pm-release-
candi...](http://www.dagolden.com/index.php/1339/cpan-pm-release-candidate/)

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zby
I don't know. For a Perl hacker this is rather boring, can it convince someone
new to Perl?

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tshtf
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.

~~~
Uchikoma
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]

~~~
jrockway
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.

~~~
danssig
>What's great about Perl is that you are forced to use very few of these
modules

That sort of kills the claim that perl is great because of the size of CPAN,
no?

~~~
draegtun
Nope. Its darwinian, the more modules in the _gene pool_ means newer/better
solutions need to fight harder to survive & win. So the outcome is often
better for Perl/CPAN, for eg. Moose

~~~
igneous4
> Its darwinian

I think you're correct, but that there are trade-offs. Take Python, for
example. They have "batteries included", and when modules make it into the std
lib, they pretty much stop evolving. _However_ , on the up-side, Python gains
users who like having everything packaged up nice and neat so they don't need
to go looking for modules quite as much.

Perl takes the popularity hit of not having too many batteries included, but
benefits from the darwinian element that works to make the 3rd-party modules
better. So, perlers need to spend more time asking around (or checking
cpanratings), and also dealing with it when there's turnover (the module that
they chose a few years ago is eclipsed by a competitor, or stops being
maintained, and now they need to rewrite some of their code).

In the end, I think Perl has better modules.

~~~
draegtun
Yes i've touched briefly on CPAN vs stdlib approach before
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2088040>). They're just different
approaches and neither is better or worse than the other.

BTW... I believe all language repos will have _darwinism_ acting upon it. I
see it in Ruby & Python as well as on CPAN. Its Perl philosophy and CPAN size
that just stirs the pot a bit more!

