Matt’s Script Archive – CPAN

Saw a message on the Catalyst mailing list about catalyzed.org, a new blog aimed at helping the public image of modern Perl. In their first post/article they happened to mention Matt’s Script Archive. So I thought I’d take a look at the old favorite.

Even back in it’s early days I thought the code that was on there was less clean than it could be, and not particuarly maintainable, but still thousands of users were running variants of the code. So why did Matt’s Archive dominate the Perl world so much? Simply because there was very little competition. Perl was one of very few mature scripting languages suitable for the job and Matt created a collection of tools all in one place that “did the job”.

So can we consider CPAN to be the modern day Matt’s Archive? It’s where we go for scripts, or more likely modules (to “do the job”). Thankfully CPAN is publicly maintained, and if you don’t like the way a module works you have a number of options from submitting a patch to creating your own version.

Whilst there are quite a few unmaintained modules on CPAN, there are a great number of current technical resources, developed in an extensible way that can be used for any number of tasks. It can certainly be said that most, every-day, functionality is exceptionally maintained. Often even older, unmaintained modules offer a starting point for development if you can’t find something current.