4 ms·
The genius of Perl is... CPAN? Huh? Perl has some very ingenious design features (most notably regex literals, which I'm pretty sure Perl had first), but a co
by amalcon 17y ago
The genius of Perl is... CPAN? Huh?
Perl has some very ingenious design features (most notably regex literals, which I'm pretty sure Perl had first), but a collection of modules -- no matter how sophisticated -- is not genius. It's very useful, perhaps more useful than anything else in its class, but it's also very obvious.
Access to CPAN across multiple languages is the main thing that makes Parrot interesting. I don't mean to say it's not useful, just that genius is the wrong term.
- hapless 17y agoCPAN isn't just a collection of modules. It's the world's largest collaboration platform. Sourceforge.net, launchpad.net, and github.com are just puffs of smoke by comparison. CPAN is 16,000 interoperable modules, most of which have comprehensive test suites AND test results across dozens of platforms. CPAN is a tradition of testing and test reporting. CPAN is a dialogue between users and developers. Lots of languages have reasonable libraries. Some even have de-facto collaborative communities. But only Perl has CPAN.