@Graham – I know he wasn’t, but I was considering what his end game was (code without documentation not released perhaps) and then trying to think of some reasons I would prefer code not to be released. The simple fact is, that in almost all cases (and particularly for CPAN where there are barriers to novices releasing code) I would prefer to have even bad code to no code.

Using Perl (or any other language) for quite some time will not make your code any better. Code quality is not a function of time.

I did a little rant today and showed a couple of lines of really bad code. But I wasn’t making fun of a newbie. That code is from a guy who has been working as a Perl developer for at least eight years now. Eight!

“But I think that a programmer who is motivated enough to release code to CPAN will be good enough to not write bad perl.”

I was with you until right there. CPAN is full or horrible Perl code. There’s over 20,000 distributions on CPAN. Do you really think they’re all good Perl?

I may have to edit the post to clarify what I meant here. What I intended, was that CPAN authors are not novice perl programmers. The bad perl they put up will not be novice bad perl, but obfuscated bad perl. (Woolly thinking there Jared) Admittedly I could check this out myself so I’d know for sure.

Thanks for pointing it out.

@Sam – you’re saying you wouldn’t be able to honestly wear this tee-shirt eh?

(actually, I was looking for some slightly different text, but this is close enough)

I release my open source free software in case someone finds it useful. I don’t know in what ways people might find it useful, that’s their business.

If they look at it, think what I’ve done sucks and as a result of that release some software that doesn’t contain what they consider to be my mistakes, then my software has still been useful, in that they’ve learned what not to do.

Now if I hadn’t released this hypothetical module, because I felt it didn’t pass some criteria of “worthiness” or because I didn’t want to support it, then that person would never have benefited from that “use” of my work, and could well have wasted time discovering the things that I’d already found out.

Of course such a situation is highly unlikely because all software I’ve released is perfect and cannot be improved upon.

I was with you until right there. CPAN is full or horrible Perl code. There’s over 20,000 distributions on CPAN. Do you really think they’re all good Perl?