Practical Perl Tools: Oh Say Can You CPAN?

Every once in a while I get asked to join a conference panel about scripting languages. It will be me, a Pythonista, a Rubyist, and a PHP developer (do they have a cute name?) all onstage together. In most cases, I think the organizers are hoping for the equivalent of a steel cage match in professional wrestling—the fewer participants standing at the end, the better. In these scenarios, I’m almost always a disappointment because I come to praise the other languages, not to bury them. I have a deep appreciation for the other languages, and I’m not afraid to state it even while I’m representing Perl. One of the key reasons I can say “I dig all of the other languages, but I choose to stick with Perl most of the time” is CPAN. This column will focus on CPAN, how to cope with both its triumphs and shortfalls, and some of the ways to interact with it that you may not have encountered before. There probably won’t be any code in this issue’s column but that’s okay because you’ll be learning ways to have other people write Perl code for you. We’re going to focus on how to consume content from CPAN; discussion about how to contribute to it will have to wait for a future column.