[erlang-questions] What problem are we trying to solve here? [was Erland users group [was re: languages in use? [was: Time for OTP to be Renamed?]]]

[Mark Allen]

On 2/17/14 6:46 AM, "Jon Schneider" <jon@REDACTED> wrote:
>I've head the displeasure of CPAN going back to the mid 90s and it's still
>a steaming heap as far as I'm concerned. I'm glad I stopped writing more
>than the very occasional bit of perl a long time ago.

As a regular contributor to the steaming heap, I am glad to report that
the CPAN client experience that you rightly found irksome is much improved
in recent years.  For example there is now a very lightweight and fast
CPAN client that asks no questions to set up -
https://metacpan.org/pod/release/MIYAGAWA/App-cpanminus-1.7001/bin/cpanm

(And the default CPAN client that ships with Perl proper will ask no set
up questions in Perl 5.20 due out in April/May.)

As far as *services to library authors* go, CPAN is a wonderful resource -
for example, within minutes of uploading my Perl code to CPAN, the CPANTS
(CPAN Testing Service) executes my tests on multiple operating systems and
multiple Perl interpreters and emails me exceptions.  As someone who
develops Perl in a very specific context (Perl 5.18 on Mac OS X) this is a
really valuable service to understand how my code behaves on platforms and
Perl interpreters different from my own.

Cheers,

Mark