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;
    }
[download]

...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.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.