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   >

In reply to A corrolary to TMTOWTDI by petdance

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.