Confession time:

About 8 years ago I was working my first non-paper route job, as the guy doing the website grunt work at a small recruiting firm. I had occasion to pick up some Perl, and I started reading PerlMonks.

For years I've been using Perl to do all my dirty work, all the little tasks that I could automate, and I never used a module from CPAN.

I knew that it was The Right Thing. I made all kinds of excuses. It's faster right now just to implement this myself instead of using CPAN. I'm learning more by doing this myself. Etc. Etc.

I recently caved and decided to look into something to help me print Go diagrams. And, holy crap, it was both easy and fast. I, having not really looked into it before, didn't really know how finite the modules got over at CPAN, and was shocked to find modules that would print Go diagrams, read game records, and even create game records from a picture of a board position. And it was easy as pie to install them and learn the interfaces.

Again, I knew that it was The Right Thing, but had always filed CPAN with the other things I should be doing but didn't have the time. Meanwhile, I wrote probably thousands of lines of code over the years that, looking back, were pretty much a big fat waste of time.

Basically, I'm admitting I was very, very wrong, and I'm hoping there is some other stubborn, casual Perl coder who will read this and give CPAN a go. It is, indeed, The Right Thing.