Nathan Torkington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> But at the same time, if you're a lone programmer, there's nothing in
> Perl that forces you to use closures or write your code in modules, or
> anything like that. Those features are there if you need 'em, but if
> you don't, you're okay.
All Perl programmers, including lone ones, really should be using CPAN as
much as they can, which means that the parts of the language needed to use
CPAN modules are part of the understanding you need.
Perl without CPAN is a much different and much less interesting language.
CPAN is arguably the most important single feature of Perl.
> If you work in a team, then the bar is raised to the union (not the
> intersection) of everyone's knowledge. But team programming is not for
> small trivial tasks, and if you're solving large complex tasks then it's
> unsurprising that you'd need some of the more advanced features of Perl.
Most single programmers are still part of a team. Just because they write
the code by themselves doesn't mean that their colleagues aren't using and
maintaining the code down the road.
In a typical group of system administrators, the features used in Perl
scripts grows by the union of the Perl knowledge of the people involved,
but the ability to maintain those scripts grows by the intersection.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
