Yes, CPAN has very, very useful things. I consider its biggest problems 1) too difficult to find things when not knowing what one wants, 2) a huge undergrowth of modules that are either bad quality or unmaintained or duplicated with a later module. The number of lingering bugs are an obstacle, yet at the same time super-useful things are "hiding" in plain view.
Apropos, Perl Dancer was "hiding" for me because I didn't see it here, http://search.cpan.org/modlist/World_Wide_Web .. but many more such discoveries in the past. A simple global ranking by popularity (the number of times downloaded) and/or by size and maturity (time located on CPAN) would expose many "new" things to many, I think. If other modules depend on them, then that may speak to quality somewhat, and much better rating could be done. MongoDB would probably make managing the collection easier. But, I am grateful for what exists of course. While watching the language certainly, I'm moving from Apache/mod_perl to Dancer/Nginx for speed and memory reason. Ok, back to lurk-mode, Niels Larsen > [OT, ADVOCACY] > > I am partial to perl and CPAN, because there are just so many things I have > been able to > do with them over the years at little expense to solve real-world problems. > And despite the fact that I also use a lot of OO modules in perl, I just > cannot get in > sympathy with a language like *****, where it seems that you have to mobilise > a couple of > dozen classes (and x MB of RAM) just to print a date or so. > Never mind the time spent trying to find their documentations. > > As a matter of fact, when I am confronted with a new kind of problem, in an > area where I > know a-priori nothing, my first stop is usually not Google nor Wikipedia but > CPAN, just to > read the documentation of the modules related to that area. Whether you need > to parse > text, to process some weird data format, to talk to Amazon, to make > credit-card payments, > to dig out and generate system statistics, to understand how SOAP works, to > drive an > MS-Office program through OLE (and know nothing of OLE to start with), create > a TCP > server, convert images, read or create and send emails, or whatever, you > always find an > answer there. Even if in the end it turns out that the answer is not > something in perl, > there is so much knowledge stored in CPAN that it is a pity that it is only > consulted by > perl-centric types. > > [IDEA] > Maybe creating a website named WikiPerl, containing just the CPAN > documentation with a > decent search engine (KinoSearch/Lucy ?), would help restore perl's > popularity ? > > Or do we just keep that for ourselves, as the best job-preservation scheme > ever designed ? > > > Ooops. I was just about to send this to the wrong list...
