I feel like no one ever told the truth to me
About growing up and what a struggle it would be
In my tangled state of mind,
I've been looking back to find where I went wrong.
-- Queen - Too Much Love Will Kill You
There are people that say reinventing the wheel is bad, that it shouldn't be done. That we should find an existing project and contribute there. Some even say that there are too many variants and choices of CPAN modules that are doing the same thing, and it is wrong. That it is contra productive and scary for the newbies. There are people that call them self CPAN police that hunt down new uploaders trying to show them how many mistakes they made...
Now look at the kids. Those experience deferred success 1000 times a day. Even if they don't fail they play most of the day. They play by repeating, copying from adults or other kids. They speak the same sentences wrongly over and over. They do the same things over and over. They fail over and over. They are just kids. Every one knows that this is how they learn. Next to the kids there is always some adult. Until the kids are really small, the adults seems like perfect to them, because they just do everything perfect.
After growing up, one day, kids finds out that the adults are not perfect. They don't do always the right thinks. And they don't know everything. The trouble is that there are many adults that think that they perfect are. But that is different topic. Let's go back to childhood.
To be precise the Perl programmer childhood. Perl programmer life. The difference is everyone is free to be born to the Perl world and grow up here. The other nice thing is that everyone is free to leave it and go and live a different life.
/me a Perl kid. I like to play, I like to try out things. I like to reinvent the wheel over and over. I don't mind that there are Perl grown-ups that do the same thing much better than I do. I don't mind that I will hit the ground while doing weird experiments. And? It's fun and everybody has to fall the first time. (and second and third and ...) And I'm just a kid!
The Perl world is different to the "reality". The biggest difference is that it's hard to see the age. Everyone is growing with a different rate and some will never grow up - like me :-P
So I would like encourage all kids to come play with toys, throw them away if they don't like them any more and not be ashamed that they "just" build "another" sandcastle. You can always destroy it and build another one, don't you?
Now back to the desert of the real. There is a plenty of legacy Perl code every where around us. Legacy sometimes mean undocumented, unmaintained, badly written or just not understood. Sending bad words and blaming people that wrote it will not fix the situation. Everyone is doing the best he can, considering his experience, mood, moon phase, weather conditions, ... at the time of writing the code. If the makes the job done, it is good. If it makes someone happy writing it, it is even better. And if there is no replacement, it is the best code ever!
