Duh (Re: Interesting article on CPAN and C/C++)

[mugwumpjism]

Because if there was a huge, widely available archive of high quality free libraries for C and C++, how would that affect the job security of the C++ programmer?

I mean, you'd spend a month developing this great library, then someone would point out to you that there was already something on CCAN to do it, and you just wasted a month, and need to waste more to bring your code into line with the "standard" interface available in the "standard" library. Would managers like that? No.

Or, even worse, you would be able to do most projects in a half, or (shudder) a quarter of the time of rewriting all of those libraries yourself. You might need to look for another contract in 3 months!

No - let's bury that thought, and keep reinventing the wheel time and time again. After all, the best person to support production code is the person who wrote it. And hey, you know what that means - being able to name your own rate.

2006-06-13 Retitled by planetscape, as per Monastery guidelines

( keep:1 edit:20 reap:1 )

Original title: 'Duh'

[mitd]

'Oh Shared Library Farts!'

There were large freely available C libraries that pre-dated even our beloved Perl. In fact if wasn't for freely available 'C' libraries Perl might not exist.

Lets look at one of Perl's most admired features the regex engine. Perl Version 1 used Larry's regex from rn which was based on James Goslings Emacs regex . In V2 Larry realized that V1 regex was lacking so he turned to Henry Spencer's popular regex package and the rest is history.

In fact some of our most popular Modules depend on freely available 'C' code. Take XML::XXXX -> expat, soon to be upgraded to libXML2 from the GNOME project. So I guess in a way CPAN has always delivered C code to the masses.

CPAN is an incredible architecture for accepting, tracking and delivering code. Loved by us and coveted by our brethren. I would watch carefully our Python brothers as they create their version of 'a better CPAN'. They might just surprise us!

Truth and history are as valuable to the true cynic as air.
-- Bernard Shaw (??)

mitd-Made in the Dark
'My favourite colour appears to be grey.'