[zbentley]

The size of the CPAN is certainly impressive. However, past a certain point, a big, multipurpose, monolithic Perl codebase being worked on by a ton of different developers is going to have significant problems caused specifically by the use of different CPAN libraries: many, many quite common libs do not "play well" with each other in quite simple cases. And I'm not talking about "I'm trying to glue together two third-party tools that weren't written with each other in mind", I'm talking "I have a request handler that once, an hour ago had to load and call a function in a given module, and is now issuing cryptic errors on all requests of a certain type because they happen to call a function in a different, totally unrelated module that worked before".

This is largely because of the sheer volume of weird global state inspections/mutations you can do in Perl--or I guess it's more accurate to say that Perl has a conveition of it being "OK" to heavily and frequently inspect and mutate global state. You can monkey patch in many languages, and sometimes it's even encouraged (Ruby), but only in Perl is it not uncommon to see monkeypatch removal or seriously altering replacement of core functionality. I've had modules hackily unload other already modules because the loaded modules' names matched a buggy load-time regex. I've had packages clobber text handling or encoding routines in other packages at compile time, or only after calling a certain function a certain way. I've had modules change the behavior of the core signal handling APIs so that any code that talked to them . . . didn't actually handle signals. And those are just the pithy examples that fit in a single sentence.

Now granted, this isn't a criticism of Perl-the-language but more of (depending on how you choose to interpret it) library authors who don't prioritize or even consider interoperability with other tools, or of Perl-the-community's conventions regarding when it's OK to go mess around in globally-stateful guts of code you don't control. You could also just as easily say that it's a symptom of the big, multipurpose monolith I had to maintain--which is valid, but other not-designed-for-huge-projects languages don't, in my experience, have problems quite this bad when they're forced to scale.

My goal isn't to cast blame, but to point out that CPAN is incredibly bloody far from a high-quality, stable, or usable code repository for certain very common use cases.

[Diederich]

> CPAN is incredibly bloody far from a high-quality, stable, or usable code repository for certain very common use cases.

Citation needed.

[zbentley]

Read the rest of my post. If you don't agree, that's fine.

[Diederich]

I read your post carefully, and I even agree with parts of it. There are major modules/module families that don't work together.

However, that's light-years from the claim that I quoted.

There are a lot of different ways of doing the same things in Perl the language and in the CPAN ecosystem. That's a strength and weakness. But in my experience, the authors of most of the modules care very deeply about doing things in a sustainable way.

[Ultimatt]

I agree there is a lot of dross on CPAN. I've also lived the frustration of seeing two kinds of exception handler TryCatch vs Try::Tiny in the same subdir of a codebase. The issue is really that a lot of basic modern functionality requires CPAN, and the core of Perl 5 is small and mostly not super helpful. Something akin to Moose in core as the new standard way to do OO would have been a good plan 10 years ago.