I'd give up Perl tomorrow if only...

[brueckd at tbye.com]

On 30 Jun 2002, Aahz wrote:

> >I suggest that you be a Perl programmer for a while, and see what having
> >CPAN accessible and authoring for it really is like.  You explicitly state
> >you aren't familiar with it.  I've been author of a couple CPAN modules
> >for about 4 years now, and an extensive user for just as long, and have
> >been a Python module writer for just over a year now.  Python is a great
> >language, but in terms of a reusable code repository, *nothing* comes
> >close to the jewel that is CPAN.  There is a reason you'll hear this over
> >and over from people coming to Python from Perl.
> 
> But somehow one doesn't hear it very often from people who've been using
> Python for a long time

Just to chime in - Aahz hit the nail on the head here... for whatever
reason, *not* having a CPAN thingy just isn't that painful right now.  
Maybe someday it will be, and when that time comes we'll build one, but
among long-time Pythonistas there just aren't that many people who are
clamoring for it, including those who were long-time Perl folk in a
previous life.

It's great that people are trying for it because it *will* be useful, and
eventually an implementation will get done and reach critical mass and
become the standard, but not yet. I'm fully confident that if a CPAN-like
system will be critical in the future, Guido will fire up the time
machine, come back, and have somebody start working on it so it'll be done
in time.

-Dave