I am a newbie (by my standards). I was watching some PerlMonks chat the other day and something quite interesting occurred to me that I thought I would share with the rest of my fellow monks.

This is not so much directed toward those who know Perl as much as it is toward those who don't know as much as they would like to know. As a newbie, I, myself, tend to think that one can learn the finer points of perl coding by attempting to write one's own code without the use of too many or any modules. This just makes sense to me. It is like trying to put a puzzle together but instead of putting it together piece by piece, someone came before you and put all but four quadrants together. Albeit, its not quite that easy. I also admit that its almost ridiculous to try and write your own basename() subroutine instead of using File::Basename *but* that is exactly my point. If a newbie would attempt to write such a subroutine I would think that that coder now knows the finer points of certain aspects of coding in Perl.

This is just my opinion. It logically seems wiser for newbies to *not* rely on modules for use but to *rely* on modules for learning. Heh, it sounds like I am not advocating modules and that is not the case at all. There is a point where it is plain obsurd to re-invent the wheel. I suppose I can sum it up like this:
I do not think it is wise for those of us who know next to nothing about Perl to rely on modules when we don't even know how those modules do what they do and therefore, do not make use of the basic knowledge of Perl coding but instead make use of a module that does all the hard work for us and at the expense that we don't know how it was done. In fact, I can express this opinion for just about any language. C is a perfect example. Once libraruies are built we have the ability to use these libs for our own use which is excellent. But, how many times do we use these libraries and not have a clue how they are being implemented?

Anyhoo, I just wanted to share that idea with everyone and see what others think. Perhaps I am way off base but I don't think so. Again, I cannot stress more that I advocate the use of modules but I think it would be an extremely useful learning tool for us newbies to examine, read, and learn how these modules work so that we can code new modules, complex modules, and scripts ourselves. I feel if we rely too heavily on modules, perhaps we will not know how to code basic Perl anymore. We'll be relying too heavily on modules =P.

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- Jim

In reply to Newbies and Modules... by snafu

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