All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

("code reuse" eq "copy and paste") and die "laughing";

Eric Wilhelm on 2006-02-17T23:52:01

A Wired Story about how "open source" code reuse has not paid-off because it's not so easy to find code to use.

So, the solution is to make a search engine to dredge up snippets of code out of abandoned sourceforge projects and make a shortcut to it on every corporate drone programmer's desktop right? There's some dissenting opinion from Sun COSO regarding potential problems with licensing. but nobody seems to mind the undertone of "more copy and paste is good" and the story is completely devoid of the word "library", "module", or anything else that would indicate the application of good design principles.

Now I just have to write a script that combines random bits of assembler and sell it as the fastest and most powerful code reuse system ever! Now you only need people to test and debug! Imagine the money you'll save, while only paying $20,000/year/seat to me for support and updates (a mere fraction of a developer's salary, which should be totally affordable because now you can fire all of your developers.)

It's funny how this stuff always sounds familiar..

Alias on 2006-02-18T14:50:32

One of the reasons I truly appreciate the Perl community as a whole is that it seems to always be ahead of the ball on these sorts of things.

CodeZoo --> CPAN
SourceForge --> CPAN + PAUSE + rt.cpan.org
Kugle --> search.cpan + annocpan

I see all these new hot open source projects talking about the bright future, and here we are living it :)

"For most people, open source is a synonym for free software. But for programmers, open source is about sharing code, building on the work of others and not having to reinvent the wheel -- at least, that's the ideal. In practice, code reuse remains very low, because it's often too hard for programmers to find relevant bits of code for their applications."

That doesn't ring true for Perl at all.