4 ms·

I'm not a full-time Perl Dev like you, but do whip up something a few times a year and it is there when I need it. I'm therefore incapable of properly replying

I'm not a full-time Perl Dev like you, but do whip up something a few times a year and it is there when I need it. I'm therefore incapable of properly replying to your thoughts although it makes sense to me (Perl is so flexible that you better have good documentation if you make a module and want it used). My thoughts are more along the lines of how much modules and CPAN are pushed in general. Most of my Perl books (Ovid's in particular) go into excruciating detail on publishing packages. It's not a two pager crammed into an appendix either, but is front and center. The Perl community frequently hosts challenges to clean up old modules and such. There is even a guy with the last name of "Anwar" if I recall correctly that is a celebrity in the community for how many modules he maintains that aren't even his (and he has also done challenges like making a new pull-request every day for like a year). That is some real dedication there to making Perl useful. It is one of the things I really like about the community. I'm a little bit of a language hobbyist even though I'm still only a novice coder in my mind. Out of all the languages that I've spent time with (probably 2 dozen) learning superficially, I'd say Perl ranks towards the top of the spectrum when it comes to focusing on this. They've evolved a relatively simple and effective system for allowing users to make, share, and document libraries.

kbenson 8y ago
> They've evolved a relatively simple and effective system for allowing users to make, share, and document libraries. Well, as is often said, simple is not easy. :) There's a large effort by the CPAN testers community to run every module (and every new version of it) against a large array of hardware and operating systems[1], and provide automated reporting to the author of any problems. This is possible because of (and incentivizes) the other great aspect of CPAN and the public modules which are on it, which is a strong culture of good test coverage of modules, and the CPAN clients running all tests and failing to install by default if any tests fail that weren't expected to. It's another wonderful feedback loop, and one not encouraged or discouraged by most languages specifically, so the fact that so many package managers for languages decided not to do so is unfortunate. When you don't start with that as an expectation, turning it on at a later date likely just results in a horrible user experience as a large number of module just fail to install (or at a minimum spew warnings which are confusing) because they are exposing what was previously something only the author saw most the time. 1: http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Path-Tiny+0.104 http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Path-Tiny+0.104
- 4thaccount 8y ago
  Thanks for the helpful replies. I didn't know that.

kbenson 8y ago

> They've evolved a relatively simple and effective system for allowing users to make, share, and document libraries. Well, as is often said, simple is not easy. :) There's a large effort by the CPAN testers community to run every module (and every new version of it) against a large array of hardware and operating systems[1], and provide automated reporting to the author of any problems. This is possible because of (and incentivizes) the other great aspect of CPAN and the public modules which are on it, which is a strong culture of good test coverage of modules, and the CPAN clients running all tests and failing to install by default if any tests fail that weren't expected to. It's another wonderful feedback loop, and one not encouraged or discouraged by most languages specifically, so the fact that so many package managers for languages decided not to do so is unfortunate. When you don't start with that as an expectation, turning it on at a later date likely just results in a horrible user experience as a large number of module just fail to install (or at a minimum spew warnings which are confusing) because they are exposing what was previously something only the author saw most the time. 1: http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Path-Tiny+0.104 http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Path-Tiny+0.104

4thaccount 8y ago
Thanks for the helpful replies. I didn't know that.