From: "Avdi B.Grimm" <avdi@...>
Date: 2001-08-29T22:15:59+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:20516] A plea for CPAN in Ruby

I know it's bad manners to ask for some non-trivial feature without offering 
to code it, but I'm going to anyway.  I just need to get this off my chest:

Bring CPAN to Ruby!!!

Recently I had occasion once again to browse the CPAN, looking for modules to 
use in an administrative program I'm coding.  And, as always, I was again 
astounded by the wealth of functionality offered by the many CPAN modules.  
There are modules there for every task under the sun.  And some of them have 
amazingly well-developed functionality compared to comparable libraries in 
other languages.  Sure, I know, you /could/ code all that functionality in 
Python, or Ruby... but in Perl, whatever your need, most likely it's already 
been coded and debugged for you.  When it's a choice between doing an 
administration task by hand, or coding a script to automate it, Perl is 
frequently the only language that makes automating the task practical, 
because of CPAN.  Even though Perl is arguably less "high-level" than either 
Python or Ruby, it's available libraries effectively make it a much higher 
level language than both of them for many tasks.

In my dream world, all of those CPAN modules would be re-coded in native 
idiomatic Ruby. Ans this may well be reality, 10 years from now.  But right 
now, I find myself forced to code in Perl because I simply don't have the 
time to recreate code in either Ruby or Python that already exists in Perl. 

So, here's my plea to those of you wizrdly enough to do it: please, please, 
PLEASE: somebody code a seamless compatibilty layer between Perl and Ruby, 
that makes it possible to pull in and use Perl modules as easily as Ruby 
ones.  Something similar to the Python/Ruby library that already exists.  I 
know it's probably really hard, but it would be sooo useful...

I think it's true, too, that if Ruby could advertise the ability to exploit 
existing Perl code out-of-box, it would help a LOT with it's general 
acceptance.  There are probably a lot of people out there who are held back 
from switching to Ruby by the prospect of re-coding dozens of Perl modules in 
Ruby.

well, that's my request. thanks for listening...