Gabor Szabo wrote:
When I teach Perl people keep asking me why do all these
people spend their free time on writing modules and
uploading them to CPAN?
I suspect part of it is like any other creative endeavor: to share with
one's
audience. And the audience here is very positive. Booing is rare
(although not
unheard of). What's more common are the helpful e-mails and suggestions
that
make the code and my own satisfaction with my work better.
Beyond that, there are additional, different, motivations per module. My
first
module was simply part of my learning perl experience, an experience that
included registering to CPAN for the first time. Another module was a
"thank-you" to another person who sent me his mathematics paper to study (I
implemented his mechanism in code). Both modules turned out to get
unexpected
interest, and I've communicated with some interesting people as a result.
-john
