December 2014 Archives

Thoughts on workplace debate

As always, if I make a post about business in general rather than about Perl in particular, I do it on my Other Blog.  As I have done this week.  Check it out, if you’re interested.

The Joy in What We Run

You may recall that my mentioning that my favorite talk at this year’s YAPC was Sawyer X’s “The Joy in What We Do”.  If you remember (or click one of these links I keep throwing at you), long about 26:28 Sawyer X makes a radical suggestion: if you want to release an application which uses Perl, maybe you shouldn’t be releasing it via CPAN.  I mean, CPAN is awesome for modules, and it’s not too shoddy for Perl apps either.  It makes it very easy to install for people who already have Perl, and know how to operate the CPAN shell, or cpanm, and either have root access on their machine or are already using perlbrew or plenv, and ...  In other words, other Perl programmers.  And, if that’s your audience, then lovely.  Although, even then ... what if you need a particular version of Perl, and particular versions of certain modules?  It’s all doable, certainly, and even moderately easy for Perl’ers of a certain experience level.  But why should we limit ourselves unnecessarily?

What Sawyer X points out is that we have the technology: we have perlbrew, and local::lib, and cpanm, and so on and so forth.  We have ways to bundle everything you need to run a given Perl app, from the precise version of Perl to the preceise version of every dependency module, all in one place, without giving a royal shit what version of system Perl someone has, or what version of this or that module they have, or whether they can install modules or not (either because of access issues or inexperience), or any of that.  We have all the pieces.  We just need to put them together.

About Buddy Burden

user-pic 14 years in California, 25 years in Perl, 34 years in computers, 55 years in bare feet.