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A comment on Why Perl?. Parent comment

Re:Why Perl? by Mithaldu on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @12:46PM (#3239195)
It doesn't need it. It just gets it because the ecosystem is there and automatically does it for everything. The database interfaces get it, the Windows Process Memory access library gets it, the Hiragana learning tool gets it. Doesn't matter how big or small the project is, the service is provided for free, for all.

That is why i said the other languages have a long way to go yet; no matter how much you try to shift goal posts or resort to out-of-band attacks.

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Re:Why Perl? by blibble on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @12:58PM (#3239253)
yes, but the point is if the utility provided by these "dists" would be mostly useless for other languages, then it's hardly honest to use said feature to promote CPAN (and therefore perl) against other languages.

the review system is a questionable advantage too, as I don't want to go digging through 16 SMTP packages to find the best one, and especially as I suspect most people install CPAN modules through the command prompt (or via their distro's package manager), rather than digging through a website.

I also note that Python tends to adopt the best packages into the standard library...

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Re:Why Perl? by Mithaldu on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @01:17PM (#3239356)
> yes, but the point is if the utility provided by these "dists" would be mostly useless for other languages, then it's hardly honest to use said feature to promote CPAN (and therefore perl) against other languages.

Jeeze, you're barely making any sense. I have to wonder if you're trolling here. My point was about the utility of the ecosystem, which is useful for any language. The dists i mentioned are just examples of distributions you could find on CPAN other than Moose which all receive the same treatment.

> I suspect most people install CPAN modules through the command prompt (or via their distro's package manager), rather than digging through a website.

The installation is done via command line, but it is always preceded by research on the websites. Would you exclusively buy movies by title alone without looking at reviews?

> I also note that Python tends to adopt the best packages into the standard library...

Perl core developers do include useful things as well, but they are fairly strict about which ones, since they prefer to leave them on CPAN so they can be developed and released at a faster pace than the core. And in fact, the core is increasingly being viewed merely as a tool to access CPAN.

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Re:Why Perl? by true_religion on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @02:44PM (#3239810)
Maybe I can put this arguement to rest.

It doesn't matter how competant your product is (CPAN) if you aren't delivering what the market wants.

Yes, CPAN provides a utility in the ecosystem, but most users do not use the extra features that CPAN provides over something like PyPi.

And even in the cases where there is a feature overlap (e.g. repository storage and breath), after a certain point things are "good enough" and theres a marginal return for adding more.

Does it matter if there are 17 SHA1 implementations on CPAN and 3 on PyPi? Not really, since you only need 1 good implementation. In fact it could be argued that having more implementations is worse due to paradox of choice.

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Re:Why Perl? by Mithaldu on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @02:51PM (#3239855)
> Yes, CPAN provides a utility in the ecosystem, but most users do not use the extra features that CPAN provides over something like PyPi.

How do you know that?

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Re:Why Perl? by berntb on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @03:32PM (#3240055)
In short, you're arguing against the long tail...

Let me add also mine anecdotal experience from yesterday:

I looked for a good SQL parser/evaluator in Python (which I partly use at work). There might be one, but I didn't find any. It is easy to find on CPAN. (And this is hardly an unusual request.)

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