I had a crazy idea last Thursday, and I reached for Perl.
I used Dist::Zilla to create a new project. I used Git over ssh to set up a new repository.
I built a small database schema for SQLite and used DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader to build DBIx::Class schema for it.
I found a custom CPAN distribution for a web service I wanted to use and added a very small piece of code using WWW::Mechanize to scrape the rest from another website.
I added a couple of Template Toolkit templates and a loop to turn my database objects into nicely-formatted HTML. Then I added a bit of JQuery to add some UI niceties.
I wrapped this all in a slightly modified design from Open Source Web Design and the silly little project has gone from "Hey, how would that work?" into something I can show my friends and family to explain just what I do.
I'm a better programmer than I was a decade ago certainly (some of my design decisions made a lot of code I'd have had to write then completely unnecessary now), but the tools and code available now are amazing.
David A. Wheeler's SLOCCount says I have ~250 lines of Perl 5 in this, and I could cut that down a bit further. This is truly a great time to be a programmer, especially in a community like the Perl community.
I think yours is the realization that comes with Open Source and all the great modern tools we have - you don't need to write software, just integrate and deploy! Sure, integration can be tough, but even that is getting easier.
absolutely. I realized the same thing last week - on a slightly lower level, though :-)
I used a .csv as my database and wrote some nice reports with charts to an OpenOffice document in less than 200 LOC.
Modules used: DBI, DBD::CSV, OpenOffice::OODoc, Chart::Clicker,
and Tie::Hash::Indexed
I am still deeply impressed..
Nice.
Just don't forget the learning curve involved. You need to know all these tools (modules, languages) to be able to integrate.
I guess that's what the 10 years refers to in the title.