Re: Simon Cozens' book

At 09:17 PM 1/3/01 -0600, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:
> From what I can tell via statistics I keep, that CGI, LWP, Net and DBI are
>far and away the most sought after modules and yet there are really few
>CGI/DBI tutorials out there that get the potential user at least
>generating a web page right off. People want to build web sites not
>necessarily become fluent in Perl programming and that's not such a crime.

No, but in order to do that safely we need to be able to encapsulate all 
the functionality that these people don't want to learn into robust, opaque 
abstractions that have some kind of consistent, complete, and simple 
syntax.  I don't see that this is yet available for Perl - the friendliest 
of modules for CGI/DBI assume that you know how to manipulate LoL, for 
instance, the pursuit of which can easily degenerate into a requirement to 
be fluent in Perl.  Which is great for folk like us, of course - leveraging 
the more powerful features of the language makes it easier to write 
succinct programs faster, if you've got the powerful features under your 
belt.  But I regularly run into people who are quite at home with most O-O 
concepts but can't figure out hashes for hours.