http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=526785

The first kitchen sink was Emacs. It was the first violation of the Unix toolbox philosophy and it was wildly successful.

The second kitchen sink was Perl. It was designed to grow between shell and C, making both more convenient. In the process, every conceivable thing that was already handy in shell (awk, sed, grep) and every handy thing in C (strings, file seeking, etc) was tossed into one huge Enchilada. In the chatterbox, many moons ago, merlyn himself said: 'Given that I use the kitchen sink of programming languages (Perl), it only makes sense that I use the kitchen sink of editors (Emacs)."

And now we have perlmonks. It is like perl month in that you can publish serious articles and get feedback. It is like alt.religion.emacs. It is like IRC with the chatterbox. It is like the fun with perl mailing list with the snippets and obfu section. And instead of being glue for various external services, it all mixed together in the everything gumbo pot. Instead of pure HTML, we have an ad hoc semi-HTML with wiki-isms mixed in. But it does work and it is popular.

And of course we have HTML::Mason and HTML::Embperl as the kitchen sink of MVC web design - templating and controller all rolled into one handy stop. Just slap on Alzabo and you ready to rock.

I'm a purist and a huge fan of decoupled design. I glue together individual components that each do their job well (that's the unix toolbox way). That's why I work so hard on HTML::Seamstress and avoid jobs advertising tt or Mason as the dynamic HTML tool. But all in all, you have to give the kitchen sinks credit. In fact as a user of XEmacs, Perl, and Perlmonks, I do more than give them credit. I use them everyday... ole!

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Re: Perlmonks: the 3rd Kitchen Sink
by EdwardG (Vicar) on Jan 31, 2006 at 16:44 UTC

    I like the analogy and the meditation. ++

    Isn't it ironic that decoupled design encourages us to go ahead and couple things together like there's no tomorrow. Your "glueing together" of individual components being case in point.

    I can't begrudge the irony though. I wouldn't ride my motorbike if it was prone to de-coupling at 100 mph.