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Comment by kanja | Hacker News Reader

I see these justifications for perl almost every time it comes up - The community, cpan, writing lots of code fast. These are good things, but it's worth pointing out that EVERY OTHER LANGUAGE DOES THAT. Ruby has gem, python has pip - modern languages have these things built in by design. Not to hate on perl, because there's things I like about it, but this article could be retitled "what I like about not using fortran"

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I know of no other language that has anything like cpantesters.org. Everything that gets uploaded to the CPAN gets tested automatically on a large matrix of Perl versions and host platforms, often within minutes of the upload. Furthermore, the entirety of CPAN is the continuous integration test suite for Perl 5 itself.

Edit to add: I know why this sounded familiar! I had forgotten I wrote about it recently:

http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2012/08/why-i-use-perl-tes...

I use Perl for the Turing completeness.

Java doesn't have any of them.

>> EVERY OTHER LANGUAGE DOES THAT

Do you really know about this?

I've done a bit of Python lately. The infrastructure isn't close (see e.g. Perl Testers, chromatic had a blog post about it quite recently). Also, CPAN is much richer than pypi.

Which modules are missing on Pypi?

Off the top of my head -- a serious sql parser and the whole TAP test ecosystem. After a while I stopped checking cpan for what I needed, since I just got angry.

Another difference: In the Perl world, you can find and have dependency trees with dozens to hundreds of modules installed from cpan -- and you expect it to work, particularly since the module tests by default are run at install. (It is a bit painful with too many dependencies, but it works if you need it.)

I think there are many cases where packages may not be in one language repo, but in another. However, Python does have a lot of testing packages available that do a swell job. Also, the JUnit test-report format these days tends to be what I see a lot of.

http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy

Also, as far as SQL, and even Object Relational Mappers goes, there's SQL Alchemy.

You can verify they are present here, in PyPi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi

SQL Alchemy doesn't have an SQL parser, which I asked for.

See http://search.cpan.org/~rehsack/SQL-Statement/

It contains a parser and evaluates SQL expressions on lots of data sources(!).

The testing tools on Perl use a common infrastructure and can work with each others in a plugin fashion.

It's not the modules - it's the infrastructure of the CPAN environment.

See this comment on an old Perl thread for some pointers

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4042344

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