I was reading this post about date handling by Friar Leon and shook my head sadly. It amazed me that someone like Friar Leon, who has clearly been around the block in Perldom, could not realize that there's a Posix.pm module. (And I certainly don't mean to pick on Friar Leon. His node was just the one that caused this train of thought.)

My premise: We somehow need to get into the heads of the Perl Populace that the CPAN IS YOUR FRIEND. Over on the perl6-* lists, there's much discussion about how to handle CPAN in Perl 6, and to promote its use.

My suggestion: I think that TMTOWTDI needs a corrolary. I suggest "Somebody's already done at least one." Alternative: "If you're working on something that isn't specific to your application, it's probably already been done."

Addendum: I'm not suggesting that a CPAN module is the only/best way to do something. What I'm asking is how we can make people more aware of CPAN, so that there's less of the "Oh my gosh, that does exactly what I spent the last N hours working on" syndrome.

xoxo,
Andy

%_=split/;/,".;;n;u;e;ot;t;her;c; ".   #   Andy Lester
'Perl ;@; a;a;j;m;er;y;t;p;n;d;s;o;'.  #   http://petdance.com
"hack";print map delete$_{$_},split//,q<   andy@petdance.com   >