Re:The CPAN Pull Request Challenge
by schnevets on Wednesday December 31, 2014 @09:24AM
(#8819430)
I'm in. People around here are sometimes cynical of Perl, but there's a lot of high quality code on CPAN that definitely shouldn't fall by the wayside.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
CPAN was Perl's claim to fame. It's what gave it the "edge" over Python and Ruby a decade ago. I think people have finally realized that edge is rapidly fading. I still occasionally use Perl but I'm trying to make my goto language Python or Go, unless I find a better functional language. After all, in 2015, shouldn't we be using OCaml or F# for our quick jobs?
I guess I'd rather invest in the future rather than try to save the past.
Although having a central repository of code on the web is no longer unique to Perl, there is still some of CPAN's infrastructure that would be nice to have in other communities. For instance, cpantesters[1].
As far as I know, only the Lisp community has something similar to cpantesters in their cl-test-grid project.
On the other hand nowadays a language community could probably set up something similar to cpantesters using travis so hopefully we'll see more of those sort of systems in the future.
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[1] - If you want to play buzzword bingo you can think about cpantesters as a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-organizing, volunteered run, cross-platform continuous integration platform that is free to end-users.
I personally have not found one module in python or ruby that makes me say "I wish I had this in CPAN" (at least for the things I use Perl for). I've tried pretty hard sometimes too...