Arc Forumnew | comments | leaders | submitlogin
Article: Why I stick with Perl: Yes, arclanguage.com, libraries are essential (jrock.us)
7 points by almkglor 5908 days ago | 4 comments


3 points by KirinDave 5902 days ago | link

Am I the only person who thinks something is wrong when a simple blog like that one evidently requires 212 different perl modules?

One thing I've noticed about CPAN and the Perl community is that they take module and library creation to the level of an autistic activity. Even the most banal and trivial of things has multiple implementations in CPAN of varying quality.

Personally, I find a system like MzScheme or Ruby, which has fewer libraries of higher quality (and the difficulty of the problems solved by such libraries is higher) to be of more value than sifting through years of accreted code and having to install multiple libraries that do the same thing out of the desire to integrate two disparate components.

-----

5 points by stefano 5901 days ago | link

Besides the fact that he used 212 diferent modules (I wonder what kind of things does his blog do behind the curtains...), the point of the post is that the Perl community has a real libraries culture: when someone solves a task, he/she puts the solution inside a module and usually documents it. This is a great thing, because it encourages code reuse more than any other programming technique (e.g. OO programming) and it is something that the Lisp community has always missed, in particular the documentation part. If the Arc community could learn that important lesson from Perl, that would be a huge leap forward for the Lisp world.

-----

4 points by stefano 5908 days ago | link

Arc2Perl? :)

-----

4 points by rincewind 5908 days ago | link

Arc2Parrot?

-----