use Perl

brian d foy posted a love note to me in his journal, and while I appreciate the kind words, I'm more interested in the community that let me do the things of which he sings. If you haven't read the link above, please do so and come back.

First, what I did wasn't all that uncommon, I hope. It was just a bit of practicality during the Day Job. We have a couple hundred files in one big CVS project and I wanted to make sure that all the POD that people write conforms to the standards of good POD. I had a problem, and I solved it. Now, the key isn't that the solution or problem were that unique: All I did was share what I had done.

Plus, note that brian is using Richard Clamp's excellent File::Find::Rule module. Where did that come from? Discussion at a Perl Mongers meeting. And then the idea was germinated in a use.perl journal thread. Again, it's the community at work. It's open source at its finest.

And so now, brian has written Test::Pod, and no sooner has he done that than Marcel Grünauer just put out Test::Comprehensive (which I hope he renames to Test::Module or Test::Distribution), which includes all of brian's stuff and then some.

This is what the Perl community is about.

This is what this whole open source system is about.

This is why I am so dismayed when we call each other names and destroy that community.