CPAN loving monks,

Perl Monks += TMTOWTDI inspired me to re-post a question that I asked more than a year ago. In addition to following CPAN updates, reading talk slides and the advent calendar, reading other people's top 10 lists is a good way to know which modules are loved.

The original post, Favourite modules March 2002, had my own top 10 in it. It's nice to see how much has changed since then.

• I had just learned about DBIx::Abstract then, and loved the idea. Unfortunately, when using it I found that abstracting SQL only makes programs less clear and much less obvious. So I created DBIx::Simple to use DBI in a way that I like.
• The list included Exporter, but I use Exporter::Tidy now to have Exporter::Heavy-ish features with a footprint smaller than Exporter's.
• I dislike POE's way of argument passing more and more. But that's not my main reason for no longer using POE::Component::IRC (it is not even a good reason, because it's easy to wrap around). I found Irssi to be a very reliable and easy to use framework for IRC bots. (I added lots of sugar to make it even easier, though.)
• IPC::Open3 is still nice, but IPC::Run makes things extremely easy (and it's said to be more portable, but I don't care much about non-unixish systems).
• I use much more of LWP now, so mentioning LWP::UserAgent and LWP::Simple separately doesn't really make sense anymore.

So here is my module top 10 for April 2003, again excluding my own modules and pragmata.

1. B::Deparse
2. Carp
3. DBD::SQLite
4. DBI
5. File::Find::Rule
6. IPC::Run
7. LWP
8. Regexp::Common
9. Benchmark
10. MIME::Lite

What are your favourite modules?

Juerd
- http://juerd.nl/
- spamcollector_perlmonks@juerd.nl (do not use).