in reply to Use modules or roll your own?

I think the concerns about not learning by using modules etc. are not answerable. Whether or not somebody chooses to learn by peeking behind the curtain, or fix every last thing is dependent on the metal they are cast from (or if the metal's been worked enough). Basically, don't worry be happy.

I'd roll my own, checking perlipc if I had to since it's been awhile. If it was extra fancy I might look at POE.

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perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"

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Re: Re: Use modules or roll your own?
by vladb (Vicar) on Jul 29, 2002 at 12:23 UTC
    I guess the author of the original post has got a legitimate issue to worry about. His concern seems to be whether reusing the old wheel will work in his particular case to solve a 'custom' problem. This happened to me just recently. In one of my projects, I set out to write a bunch of modules to do RDBMS interaction. However, after realizing that I'm essentially doing the same work that Class::DBI already does, I hastily switched.

    Later, however, I've discovered a number of features that the module lacked and that was a real set back as I was hoping to meet tight deadlines. So, I ended up hacking into the module to fix a few things (such as deleting cross reference records from tables with multiple primary keys). On one occassion, the behavior of the module was so unintuitive I ended up messing my database data in unexpected places.

    In all, I say, if you ever go to reuse an old wheel, please do study it closely first. Check for any possible defects or lacking features before use. At times it may even be hazardous to introduce an unknown or poorly studied 'formula' (aka module) into your equation (aka project).

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