Re: Modern Perl and the Future of Perl

[Herkum]

in reply to Modern Perl and the Future of Perl

I think that Perl documentation, being integrated with the code is a problem. Perl does have better documentation a lot of other languages. However, in order to update/change the documentation, you have to get the author to update their distribution.

The other limitation of this is that is hard to include examples for code that is is outside the scope of the immediate module, example: Code on how to integrate Module Foo and Module Bar.

I would like to see a Perl Wikipedia be set up. We need to be able to provide more documentation than is available in a CPAN module or the Perl faqs.

[Cop]

I never thought of the document bit. Good point! My first thought was that Java has a similar issue, but after I thought more, I realized the differences.

[doom]

The other limitation of this is that is hard to include examples for code that is is outside the scope of the immediate module, example: Code on how to integrate Module Foo and Module Bar.

People do write "Cookbook" modules that just cover documentation of things like this.

You also can write "Tutorials" and so on for perlmonks.

I would like to see a Perl Wikipedia be set up. We need to be able to provide more documentation than is available in a CPAN module or the Perl faqs.

The perl-wiki idea is a common suggestion, though for whatever reason it doesn't seem to excite the insiders. If I remember right, one of the standard answers is that it's been tried many times, but never seems to catch on.

(Myself, I have no complaints about perl documentation whatsover -- I suspect it's the best documented language in history.)

[jj808]

I would like to see a Perl Wikipedia be set up. We need to be able to provide more documentation than is available in a CPAN module or the Perl faqs.

This already exists, see http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi.