Almost every day on the Perl groups on LinkedIn (or Facebook, or StackOverflow, or somewhere like that) I see a question that includes the restriction “I do not want to use any modules”.

There was one on LinkedIn yesterday. He wanted to create a MIME message to pass to sendmail, but he didn’t want to install any modules. Because “getting a module installed will have to go though a long long process of approvals”.

And I understand that. I really do. We’ve all seen places where getting new software installed is a problem. But I see that problem as a bug in the development process. A bug that needs to be fixed before anything can get done in a reasonable manner. Here’s what I’ve just written in reply:

Of course it can be achieved without modules. Just create an email in the correct format and pass it to sendmail. Ah, but what’s the right format? Well, that is (of course) the tricky bit. I have no idea what the correct format is. Oh, I could Google a bit and come up with some ideas. I might even find the RFC that defines the MIME format. And then I’d be able to knock up some code that created something that looked like it would work. But would I be sure that it works? In every case? With all the weird corner-cases that people might throw at it? This is where CPAN modules come in handy. You’re using someone else’s knowledge. Someone who is (hopefully) an expert in the field. And because modules are used by lots of people, bugs get found and fixed. A lot of modern Perl programming is about choosing the right set of CPAN modules and plumbing them together. That’s what makes Perl so powerful. That’s what makes Perl programmers so efficient. We’re standing on the shoulders of giants and re-using other people’s code. If you’re not going to use CPAN then you might as well use shell-scripting or awk. If you’re in a situation where getting CPAN modules installed is hard, then fixing that problem should be your first priority. Because that’s a big impediment to your Perl programming. And investing time in fixing that will be massively beneficial to you in a very short amount of time.

The obvious solution is to install your own module tree (alongside your own Perl) as part of your application. But that might be overkill in some situations, so you could also consider using the system Perl and asking your sysadmin to install packages from your distribution’s repositories. Of course, that might need a change in process. But it’s a change that is well worth making; a change that will improve your (programming) life immensely.

Update: Some very interesting discussion about this over on Reddit.