From: Marcelo <marcelo.magallon@...>
Date: 2009-04-14T01:05:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Can Ruby stay ahead ?

On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 18:22, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <zznmeb@gmail.com> wrote:

> *Quantity* ... CPAN far outnumbers Python, Ruby and other languages in
> the number of packages. To paraphrase Garrison Keillor, "If it isn't
> in CPAN, chances are you can build your application without it."

Quality, actually.  Quantity is just the cherry on top.

Start here: http://search.cpan.org/

What do you see?

From there, you can go here:

http://search.cpan.org/search?query=html+parser&mode=all

(I'm picking a not-so-random example, one that's good enough for
illustration purposes)

You see HTML::TreeBuilder there and check it out:

http://search.cpan.org/~petek/HTML-Tree-3.23/lib/HTML/TreeBuilder.pm

What do you see there?

I see a decent introduction, I see examples, I see a documented API,
written from the point of view of someone who wishes to use it yet
doesn't know enough about it, not from the point of view of someone
who already knows about it and wants to be reminded of a particular
detail, I see cross-references, I see links to other relevant
information, among which is this:

http://search.cpan.org/~petek/HTML-Tree-3.23/

What do you see there?

I see history, I see reviews, I see a discussion forum, I see
information that's neatly organized...

I see *usability*.

And this is just scratching the surface of the website representation
of CPAN.  CPAN is not only that website.  As the name implies, CPAN is
a network of resources.

But David did hint at something else that I see as a problem: a
strange type of hostility towards criticism that not even the Perl
community displays.  Oh, and that strange notion that rubygems somehow
works in the same problem domain as CPAN does.  If something, rubygems
provides a small subset of the functionality that CPAN does.  The main
difference I see is integration.

This is a good read: http://www.cpan.org/misc/ZCAN.html

Marcelo