My first formal introduction to programming ( and Perl ) was a book titled Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web.

I was so excited to have the ability to add some dynamic features to my then static website. All I was really doing was processing form information and sending emails. The really cool thing was that all I had to do was put some funny code at the top of my script and I got this $form{'xyz'} thingie that held all of my form's contents. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

require parseForm.pl

&parseForm;

$name = $form{'name'};
...

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This parseForm thing was a good thing -- I didn't care what was inside the black box, I just knew that it worked.

Once I learned about the CPAN it was like I didn't even need to learn any more Perl to get my tasks done. I read RTFM for module X, copied the example out of the POD, changed a few variables and I was in business! I got the job done.

4 years later...

Lately I've been interested in taking my web apps to the next level past DBI and HTML::Template. I've been doing alot of reading and playing around with Class::DBI, Template Toolkit and these MCV web development frameworks (Catalyst & CGI::Application) that do alot of that old boring repetitive work for me.

I'm noticing that I'm still not really required to know much Perl to write these semi-robust apps. As long as I understand what method to call on what object then I'm ok.

I look back and realize that not much has changed for me over the last 4 years. I'm still writing web apps, there's just ALOT more abstraction between me and the actual Perl code that's doing the work.

As I look back I feel a bit cheated -- I use these OO modules every day and I don't really know what's under the hood. When I hit a road block I just post a question here, or to a news group and within minutes I have my answer.

Where will it end?

What will the future of Perl be once we have a framework written for most common applications?

Will the below code be the future of Perl? 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use My::Wiki;

my $wiki = My::Wiki->new( config => 'file.txt' );
   $wiki->run();

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I know code reuse is a good thing, but don't let it hamper your programming skills. You just might wake up one day and realize that you're a Saint in The Monastery that can whip up a cool web app in an afternoon, but still needs to RTFM when dereferencing a complex hash ref.

-Just Another Module User

In reply to Is too much abstraction a bad thing? by silent11

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