[wwweston]

If it’s available via a module, it’s done. And it smoothes over some versioning/compat issues.

Useful talk deals in benefits and tradeoffs (as the linked article demonstrates in spades). Useless talk deals unsupported “should”s.

[petre]

Sure. I've been using the language for more than 10 years but this is dumb: different modules for every trivial feature that should be a language feature instead. Smart match is a perfect example. Smoothes off nothing. I'll be off using Ruby, thank you.

[wwweston]

You manage feature differences one way or another. If you like choosing rbenv vs rvm vs asdf and then using them to manage your ruby versions and gem dependencies rather than having in-band switches in a single interpreter, great, you're welcome. I could even see someone making a case that it fits neatly within an org where systems/devops folks take more of the environments/dependencies division of labor.

If what you really like though is the charge you get out of just saying "this is dumb" while indulging the privilege to not even notice that you did a repeat performance of unsupported shoulds vs worthwhile tradeoffs, though, well, maybe you should examine that.

[petre]

I use the system Ruby and don't have to worry too much about rbenv and rvm. 2.7 and even 3.0 is well supported. That's what I also did with Perl, except when I used MacOS which was a pain because of modules that used C libraries like LibXML. On Linux we can also use containers without worrying about speed penalty. There are sufficient solutions and okay tooling. Ruby's also got not one but two JIT compilers right now.

[redundantly]

The Perl module system is awful.

[petre]

It's a lot better than Node's NPM.

[recrof]

how so?

[rjh29]

Serious answer:

* the module system literally just runs a script, so it can do -anything-. As a result there are 3 or 4 competing install systems all with their own cruft, some defined entirely using Perl as config, some using YAML. You need to have all of them installed.

* Of these, Module::Build is a common one written by someone who completely overengineered it, and it installs hundreds of dependencies, even though all it really does is just copy some files.

* Install scripts can do stuff like ask you interactive questions that prevent automated installation, which is a constant hindrance when packaging Perl modules e.g. to RPM

* Perl leaves literally everything up to external modules, including exporting functions or even defining module dependencies (e.g. 'use base', 'use autoclean', 'use Exporter' ...) and often the module config is written entirely in Perl rather than YAML or JSON file, so trying to do anything clever (like add IDE/language server support) is an absolute nightmare.

* The client to install new modules initially asks about 20 questions and does a slow mirror test, making it difficult to use in automated settings. Luckily someone wrote cpanminus which literally does exactly what you want - installs the damn package.