I use modules often. I rarely use a module I don't understand, though. Hey, it got me to learn a lot about sockets -- I realized the LWP bundle would do the job of the socket nonsense, but I wanted to make sure I knew what that nonsense was. If you think you can make a portable program without using modules, you're doing one of the following:

• making a program that isn't meant to be ported
• making a simple program that really needn't rely on complex operations, and therefore complex modules
• making a mistake somewhere

That doesn't mean you can't make something better than a module that is out there already -- but it's not likely. It is more than easy to write a crummy CGI query parser that "gets the job done" when the job consists of reading the query string from a GET query. But then you might need to add support for POST, and then come file uploads. And you probably didn't read the RFC on how query strings can be formatted. It's also easy to do a crummy job of parsing HTML tags.

If I seem condescending or rude, I apologize, but I've had to argue my point several times. Not using a module because it's not in the standard distribution is no excuse -- if a sysadmin is not competent enough to install a Perl module, then they don't know how to use gzip, tar, and make. That is very sad. Or, if they are stingy, and won't do it, you can install the module in a local directory.

There's a reason there are so many modules. There's a reason they come with their source and documentation.

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