Re: use CGI and die;

[chromatic]

Let me play biologist's advocate for a moment.

The internals are a mess.

How often do you need to look in a module's internals? Have you read strict or Carp lately?

The documentation reads more like a tutorial than a man page.

Again, I don't see the problem. It has tremendous sample code, and I've found just about everything I've ever needed in there. Maybe having a very short man page would help, but I make liberal use of the search command in my pager.

There's a lot of stuff that could be *pruned* from the documentation, but that's just my opinion.

It should only be used for basic CGI tasks.

I don't particularly ever want to write another form field stickiness loop again. I don't care for most of the HTML generation, but they're convenient in spots. This is a matter of inertia and taste, and I don't think those make for strong arguments either way.

Other modules exist with similar functionality.

The same could be said about the other modules!

CGI is installed by default on any version of Perl worth using. It works. (It even does P3P cookies.) It's well tested. It has copious documentation. Just about anyone worth listening to about web programming in Perl knows how to use it.

That's a lot to overcome. Granted, I do use CGI::Simple in Jellybean 0.30, with a blessed glob patch, but that was a conscious decision. I still recommend people start with CGI.pm.