[Gllug] OSS CMSs

[Doug Winter]

Richard Jones wrote:
>>The standard libraries (CPAN) are a nightmare.  The code is very
>>difficult to read at the best of times, and is almost completely
>>unmaintainable.
> 
> However, this is certainly not true.  CPAN represents a huge and
> useful resource of well-thought out libraries for Perl.  I like it so
> much, I wrote perl4caml so we can import CPAN libraries unchanged into
> OCaml!

I didn't mean the quality of the code - that is, well, variable.  A lot 
of it is very good.  The problem is managing large scale deployments, as 
I once did, where version skew or missing dependencies can cause massive 
problems.

Obviously this is a problem with shared libraries from any source, but 
CPAN manages, in my view, to provide just enough functionality to stop 
people planning for this problem, without providing the functionality to 
solve it.

>>It actively discourages object orientation,
> 
> A good thing.

OK, it actively discourages any kind of organic growth of meaningful 
structure :)  Whether that structure is OO or something else isn't the 
important bit really - the problem is that perl tends towards dog food.

>>it encourages invisible side-effects and uses obscure punctuation to
>>actively disguise what it's doing.
> 
> When you understand how Perl works, the "obscure" punctuation is fine.

I understand how it works.  It still sucks.

> Well, it's a dynamically typed language, so like all the other dynamic
> languages we're talking about (Python, Ruby), it suffers in comparison
> to the better statically typed languages with type inference (OCaml,
> Haskell, SML).

I'm intrigued - can you give me an example of your point?

doug.


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