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Comment by phpnode | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a perl coder, but the library support does seem pretty fantastic - http://www.cpan.org/

I would say "pretty fantastic" is an understatement...CPAN is the gold standard of library support

Maybe, for the modules that build and actually have useful documentation. That seemed to me to be depressingly uncommon.

See CPAN Testers:

http://www.cpantesters.org/

What platform are you on? I can't remember the last time I tried to install a module on a modern Linux distribution and had problems with it. Docs might be weaker than I'd like in some cases, mostly because of not enough examples (the curse of most documentation, IMHO).

I don't develop on Windows or Mac, since I work on server-side software, so I might just be blissfully ignorant of a serious problem.

Linux. I think the most recent example (by which I mean about two years ago; I don't use Perl much) was trying to get the XML Signature modules to build. I gave up in the end.

The documentation for those was poor. I remember the documentation for Moose being poor, as well as the documentation for Catalyst being especially bad.

My experience is that the Perl community documents better than any other scripting language community. Most everything is perldoc (which gets installed as man pages when install a cpan package) with clear examples right up front where you can see them.

And that's not even talking about the built-in documentation. Even in 1994-5 when I first learned Perl, I learned it completely from the Perl man pages and not from a book. The man pages are comprehensive, easy to read, and organized well for reference.

Ruby, Python, PHP and Node really need to get their act together and follow Perl's lead in this area.

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