[derrickpetzold]

Thank you I did read the post. Python has pypi. Ruby has gems. I'm not going to google the rest but if they don't have one there is no reason why they can't.

And FYI pypi is better than CPAN so all the other stuff in the that post is crap imho. I was a Perl dev for ~10 years. Now have about 5 worth of Python. So thank you.

[Mithaldu]

I don't know about python, but ruby's gems are quite inferior. Just two points:

gems has no idea if any specific gem is already installed, so if you ask it to, it will just install over whatever is there, no matter if it's the same or not.

Additionally it does not automatically run tests and abort if they fail, so the chance of installing a broken gem over your existing working gem is pretty big.

[otterley]

There is a culture of documentation, cooperation and tolerance in the Perl community that, IME, doesn't really exist for other language communities (Ruby and Python).

Compare, for example, AnyEvent's documentation with that of Twisted - or any of Perl's standard documentation with that of Ruby.

[chromatic]

I'm not going to google the rest but if they don't have one there is no reason why they can't.

That somehow fails to convince me that other language ecosystems parallel the CPAN in breadth, scope, maturity, and ecosystem. See CPAN Testers, for example.

[derrickpetzold]

Oh my apologies I wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything if that's what you are thinking. I was only stating fact based on my experience but that's okay just downvote this and make yourself right.

[kamaal]

Nobody was down voting you to make themselves right. But the remarks that you made about CPAN to be frank didn't make any sense at all to anybody who has worked with CPAN seriously over years.

Both in terms of quantity and quality CPAN beats any other scripting ecosystem by a very great margin. And its really not about the number of the modules. That many number of modules would not have been possible if Perl(syntax, extensions system) was not flexible enough to allow them.

The traditional approach used by languages is to first build a set of semantics define a syntax and standard library for it. Then any other development in that language happens through frameworks and libraries. Perl is special in this case that Perl allows syntax extensions through modules. There fore you will find not just Modules to do your task, but also modules that add and extend to exiting Perl syntax with sugar. Perl 6 extends this concept further through grammars.

How often and how many language are there today(Counting Python and Ruby especially) that can add something like Moose(Moosex extensions) and other syntactical extension to their language, without breaking backwards compatibility?

Python took around 8 years and broke backwards compatibility to make as little changes as context of a for loop and print statement. Now imagine what it would take Python to fix its object system or its scoping problems.

[derrickpetzold]

Thank you for the excellent reply. That was response I was hoping for. I don't know everything and I appreciate you talking on point and not just pressing the down arrow because someone said something you don't like.

Regards,

[berntb]

>>... not just pressing the down arrow because someone said something you don't like.

Sigh... :-)

He started:

>>Nobody was down voting you to make themselves right. But the remarks that you made about CPAN to be frank didn't make any sense [etc]

Are you really surprised about the down votes...?

[derrickpetzold]

> Sigh... :-)

I honestly have no idea what you mean by that :).

> Are you really surprised about the down votes...?

For that post of course not. For the others yes.

I can only assume you are coming from this viewpoint

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

and no I don't think I had anything genuinely new to bring but I how could I know about something I didn't know about.

I guess what I am really saying if people can't acknowledge the flaws in a thing how could they ever make it better. And to say even more if they can't vocalize their reasoning how does downvoting make it okay but I am sure that is another thing I have missed.