[Su-Shee]

Err.. yeah - what do you think after whom gems etc. are modeled? :)

Haskell's system is called "hackage" for example and "R" has its "CRAN" and so on.

Though it's really no fair comparison as CPAN contains what.. 89033 modules? http://search.cpan.org/

[swombat]

Just because it was modelled after CPAN doesn't mean it's not better.

I'm not very familiar with PyPi since I'm not a Python programmer, but Gems pretty much work exactly like they should. Especially when you throw RVM into the mix.

[btilly]

Ruby gems by default don't run unit tests. If you care about reliable software, this is a bad thing compared to CPAN.

[microtherion]

And CPAN itself was modeled after CTAN, as far as I recall...

[danieldon]

    89033 modules

Only 21694 distributions, though. The analogue in Ruby is a gem and RubyGems already has 19502.

[ldng]

Ok. Shitload of lib err bricks. Great. Where are the prefab houses (frameworks) that help you get the thing done ... fast ? Perl has building blocks but lacks known products. Either finished products you just have to configure (like Drupal or Wordpress) or higher level building blocks (say Rails) that help you get where you want to get faster.

Note I didn't say there is not such product/framework, just, as the articles says, they are not promoted/known.

[Mithaldu]

Mojolicious, Dancer, Catalyst (biggest and most enterprise one), CGI::Application, Jifty.

There's a whole bunch of them, with different design goals or philosophies.

[ldng]

I didn't there wasn't, just that the need better promotion. Call it screencast if you wish. They need Promotive Passionate Users.

[edit] I'm gonna pick a little bit on Catalyst and do a quick surface review at website level from a non-Perlist POV.

Homepage : ok, looks nice.

Documentation : uuh ! Dry redirect to CPAN. First impression before reading, it's not the doc, it's the API doc. Ah, wait a second, it _is_ the doc. Not very appealing and some things are so not obvious that it takes a note to understand it like "Note: Click on the heading in the previous line to jump to the actual chapter. Below is a "table of contents" for this chapter."

Download : Again directly to CPAN, at first sight confusingly looks like an API doc. For newcomers not versed in Perl it is not very friendly.

Community : not much to say, a good wiki with apparently interesting stuff to read. But the first thing you see is that the "Why Catalyst is an excellent web application framework?" is an empty page.

The perl community has every reason to be proud of CPAN. It's great tool but it's not the answer to everything. It's all therem but it lacks the last mile, the 20% of polish to make it a tad more friendly/attractive.

It's the whole point of the article I think. It's not to criticize Perl, just to say it needs a better marketing strategy.

[loewenskind]

>Though it's really no fair comparison as CPAN contains what.. 89033 modules?

Why do people keep trotting out this stupid pointless number. How much of that is duplication? How much of it is crap? How much of it is literally toys (e.g. ACME stuff)? In any case, Java has vastly, vastly more so any language that runs on the JVM automatically beats perl here.

99% of programmers will never notice any functionality missing in Ruby or Python that CPAN has.

[chromatic]

Why do people keep trotting out this stupid pointless number.

Metcalfe's Law. The value of the CPAN increases dramatically with every addition, especially because of the maturity of the entire CPAN infrastructure: CPAN testers, CPANTS, annotations, reviews, dependency tracking, BackPAN tracking, gitpan, linked documentation, et cetera.

[loewenskind]

>CPAN increases dramatically with every addition

Demonstrably nonsense. Let me add a new module called ACME::DoNothing. What have I increased besides disk space and a meaningless module count?

[chromatic]

You've tested the entire CPAN ecosystem, as well as the ability of the ecosystem to identify and remove harmful contributions, if said contribution is in fact harmful.

[loewenskind]

I'll concede that that is very good. And I'll also concede that I can't think of any other systems that do this as well as CPAN (if at all). But my point remains that for 99% of developers we want a library that provides functionality (e.g. an ORM for a common database) and in that respect CPAN will only have an advantage for very obscure requirements. And even then it still loses to Java.

The testing stuff is good and it's the direction everyone should be going but not having it obviously isn't too much of a problem because so few systems currently have it (CPAN was successful long before it had it as well).

[Mithaldu]

> not having it obviously isn't too much of a problem because so few systems currently have it

You can't really draw that conclusion. Other systems do not have it because it is not an easily solved problem, not because they do not think they need it.

Also, needing and benefiting from something are two entirely different things. Yes, no language actually NEEDS this kind of thing. But a language that has it is literally self-healing, since any kind of problem, be it breakages from dependencies, cross-platform issues or core language changes are communicated very rapidly to the developers without them even needing to make an effort.

[chromatic]

The testing stuff is good and it's the direction everyone should be going but not having it obviously isn't too much of a problem because so few systems currently have it....

The Perl 5 Porters mailing list has automated mailings which test CPAN against bleadperl to discover which, if any, commits break existing CPAN distributions. This helps p5p revert genuine mistakes and CPAN authors to patch their bugs.

I know that several minor revisions of other languages have broken several popular extension libraries.

[kentnl]

Without a testing infrastructure, you pretty much rely on programmers having code doing what they say it does, instead of having proof it does what they say it does.

Given human penchant to slip up and not realise problems until after they are encountered, having tests makes pretty much the difference between "science" and "hypothesis"