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by Hosohoso 3955 days ago
My experience from a decade ago was different than most here, I had not so much luck with CPAN.

Many libraries and projects, but most of them alpha or abandoned. It took a lot of time to find stuff that was built well enough for production and was still maintained.

2 comments

What exactly were you looking for? Which libraries did you find that were alpha or abandoned?

It's highly likely that your experience was simply due to the problem domain you were looking at. If i were to look at something i work with, 3d graphics, my results would look much the same as what you said.

That doesn't mean all of CPAN's like that though.

Web development.
At that time CGI::Application was way out of alpha and actively maintained.
I prefer using libaries instead of developing everything on my own, so usually I use 10-20 libraries for a project beyond a web framework, e.g. credit card management, HTTP library,.... YMMV and if a web framework is all you need, hurray to you.
I asked for "What exactly were you looking for? Which libraries did you find that were alpha or abandoned?"

You only said "Web development."

Now you're addressing completely different problem domains, so if you don't like my answer, than that is because your initial answer to my question wasn't very clear. Were my questions unclear?

Not sure why you agressivly attack me.

But sorry. This was more than a decade ago, I've done dozens and dozens of projects since then with Java, C, Ruby, Python, Clojure, Scala, Javascript, Coffescript and Typescript and more, so I can't remember 'exactly' what libaries I was using more than 10 years ago in some Perl projects.

"Now you're addressing completely different"

I beg to differ, in my book credit card processing during e-commerce checkou and accessing backend services with HTTP are in the problem domain of 'web development', but it might be different for your 'web applications'.

"Were my questions unclear?"

Wow, I would never want to work with someone as bossy as you, sir.

This is precisely one of the things that CPAN allows.
In that sense CRAN is better maintained. It has to keep up with the changing R environment or it doesn't get included anymore IIRC.