in reply to On Perl CPAN modules

OK I understand the need/wish to do things for yourself. I've played the "dat not borned here" game myself more than once.

What confuses me is why you get so upset that people point out the modules. Just let that slide. You can't get all huffy about not having access to CPAN on this website, because, HELLO, it's a WEBSITE. And you are going to have a hard time convincing me you got perl installed on a laptop that has no floppy drive, cdrom, modem or network card.

Worse, you are going to have a real hard time convincing me that you write entire apps from scratch on your laptop in some remote mountain villa where you have no internet access.

I don't think modules off CPAN are always the answer they are often the starting point. If it is too slow, fix or replace it. If it doesn't have the capabilities, add to it, fix it or replace it.

The guy who invented the wheel deserves a lot of credit, the guys who worked to make it better deserve credit, the guy who reinvents it poorer, less featured, and more specific can't reasonably complain when people go "ho hum, you buy those at Walmart, why carve them yourself, sloppily?"

And don't get me wrong here, your code was fine and dandy and looked it through for new ideas and to see how things worked. It's just that merlyn was more than correct in pointing out that a complete, generalized version of the same trick existed in a place where we all look for code.

Code reuse is one of the Holy Grails of computing and Perl's CPAN is the singular shining example I know of that shows the promise of that quest. I can't imagine bothering to rewrite CGI when it already exists. And I doubt greatly that performance is that much of an issue that it needs a faster core. If I were to do anything, I'd condsider ripping CGI into sub modules as Mr. Stein keeps threatening to do. You'd do us all a great service by taking CGI and fixing it, you'd do us little good and yourself only moderate good by stubbornly "fixing" it yourself, blind to the YEARS of experience that have gone into making it work well for the whol community.

#erk

Whups, that turned into a rant. Sorry.

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)

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RE: RE: On Perl CPAN modules
by strredwolf (Chaplain) on Oct 01, 2000 at 19:23 UTC
    True, true, but in a place where there is no access (such as next door to a very full computer lab w/no way to transfer files from one computer to another) you're kinda stuck.

    Splitting CGI.pm would be worth it, of course. However, from what I've seen, rewriting it would be better. That, and I'm not too sure about object orientation and perl in most cases.

    --
    &$WolfSkunks({use Perl;}); do {$you};

[reply]

      I've quit calling Perl object oriented. I call it "Object Capable" when describing it. It's not object oriented at all, it's object occasionally wanders in the direction. =P

      One of the benefits to working in Perl is not being tied down by "method"ology when you don't want it. Writing a module only to discover that half of the methods are just returning and setting state values tends to disgust me. That is another benefit of the Perl community, they rarely vilifiy procedural coding. Most of the perl coders seem to have grown up from shell scripting. Even the "classically trained" coders shed their inhibitions and indulge.

      --
      $you = new YOU;
      honk() if $you->love(perl)

[reply]
        And thankfully, there is that capability -- having more than one way to do things.

        I'm half tempted to call into question how good the CPAN's modules' code is, but then I'm a bit of a paranoid git who likes to compile his own source code for anything more than the Slackware 7 install does.

        --
        &$WolfSkunks({use Perl;}); do {$you};

[reply]

      Just out of pure curiosity... Why do you want to use CGI.pm on a computer with no web access? ;--0

[reply]
        Web access does not imply a lack of an intranet, necessarily. There could be internal webservers that need automation.

        As an example, BellSouth.Net, here in Atlanta, has firewalls so restrictive that only a browser may get out, and to a limited number of sites, at that. Can't get e-mail from home, can't telnet, ftp, or ssh. Which is weird, because you'd think a company that's a multi-million user ISP would have a decent network...

        --Chris

        e-mail jcwren
[reply]
        I think I was going at it in five different angles at once. I do that too often... damn these rants of mine.

        --
        &$WolfSkunks({use Perl;}); do {$you};

[reply]

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