From: Yanik Magnan Date: 2008-08-07T03:37:21+09:00 Subject: Re: perl and the culture of libraries Being a relative newcomer to Ruby and coming off of Perl, this is something I'd love to see in many gems. There are so many gems I'd love to use but can't figure out by reading the documentation (or lack thereof), and I don't really want to read through all the source just to use it in two lines of code. -- Yanik Magnan • http://r-ch.net On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 10:46 AM, Avdi Grimm wrote: > On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 8:56 AM, Martin DeMello wrote: >> The important thing about Perl is that we have a culture of writing >> good libraries. No Perl programmer would write a few lines of code, >> post it to a blog, and call it a "library". Everyone feels obligated >> to create a CPAN distribution, with documentation (sometimes a bit on >> the minimal side, but not everyone is a writer), a test suite, a >> Makefile, etc. I'm not sure why, but this always happens. I think it's >> because there is a strong convention, and tools that make following >> the convention easy. > > I've always liked the Perl documentation conventions. Particularly > the fact that *every* CPAN manpage starts with a Synopsis which > demonstrates the essential usage of the library in a few lines of > code. > > -- > Avdi > > Home: http://avdi.org > Developer Blog: http://avdi.org/devblog/ > Twitter: http://twitter.com/avdi > Journal: http://avdi.livejournal.com > >