Someone was recently
asking about idioms. Perhaps the value of
Sort::Maker to you was as a reference (perhaps even, since you were familiar with the techniques involved, a
stylistic reference). Once something becomes so simple for you that it's easier to do it on your own than ask someone to do it for you, well, it's easier to do it on your own.
Occasionally I memoize a function by myself. It's just too damn easy to code, and in some environments much easier to deploy than requiring an extra module. This bloats my code somewhat, but mostly it goes against the Doctrines of Code Reuse and of The Separation of Concerns. To hell with that! If my project needs to memoize one function, I may very well do it myself. If it starts happenning all over the place, then I'll pull in Memoize or Aspect::Library::Memoize. I'm also thinking about the future maintainer: someone not familiar with the technique (or with its name) may actually need to spend less overhead thinking about what this means:
{
my %cache;
sub calculate_stuff {
my ($data) = @_;
return $cache{$data} if exists $cache{$data}; # cache hit
# calc
return $cache{$data} = $result;
}
...than meeting a completely unfamiliar name, finding a reference, and explicitly learning something new. Maybe it's
better for them to know the memoization technique, but my primary concern in writing maintainable code is not to educate my successors.
So sometimes the help of a module is in its paradigmatic solution of a problem. Someone once said that the real trick is to copy good design, not just good code.