Perl/CPAN v. Ruby ?

[Jonathan Peterson]

> > 
> > About this |--| far based on my experience :) 
> 
> My ascii art skills must be waning - I guess |--|
> translates as not very far ?

Well, it might be a long way off.

But yes, I found myself pining for CPAN quite soon. I tried rails on a 
small existing project, and found it clever but infuriating, probably the 
way many people view Perl. 

Most of what coding I still do is just joining libraries together - 
there's not much real cleverness in my code, so the availability of high 
quality libraries counts for more than the language. If CPAN magically 
transformed into Python, or Ruby, or ECMAscript overnight, I'd switch to 
programming in those languages to continue with CPAN.

Sure, Ruby has DBI, but not DBIx::Simple, my preferred lightweight 
version. It doesn't have Memoize (optimization for the terminally lazy), 
and while I'm sure it has most of LWP, I can't be bothered to re-learn a 
slightly different model for all those request, response, URI classes.

I can't think of the last non-trivial program I wrote that wasn't at least 
60% CPAN.