List-Objects-WithUtils
(1.000001)
Modules like this, which let you replace Perl's built-in operators with a bunch of object-y arrow-infested junk, belong in Acme::.
educated_foo - 2013-05-10T11:38:01 (permalink)
3 out of 5 found this review helpful.
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Statistics-Basic
(0.42)
What a horrible interface: why call a function to take the mean of your data when, instead, you can simply create a new "mean object" with the data, then "query" it to get the result? </sarcasm> Plus there's not much functionality. If you want statistics, use Statistics::Descriptive.
educated_foo - 2006-02-05T09:17:23 (permalink)
8 out of 11 found this review helpful.
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bioperl
(1.4)
Good news: bioperl is fairly complete and correct, as far as I can tell.
Bad news: it's absolute agony to use, making easy things hard, and hard things slow. A few points:
* The interface is a twisty little maze of objects, all alike.
* Many methods are unnecessarily slow.
* Some formats (e.g. BLAST) are incompletely supported.
* The documentation "follows standards", which means that many of the less-used bits are documented with a pile of uninformative but mandatory boilerplate.
* For simple tasks, it's usually easier to roll your own than to wade through the docs.
Other modules are a better bet if they meet your needs -- see e.g. Chemistry::* and Boulder::* .
educated_foo - 2005-03-01T11:22:13 (permalink)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful.
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Mac-PropertyList
(0.9)
Easy to use, but really quite slow compared to raw XML::Parser. Parsing a moderate-size iTunes library file, for example, is far too slow to be useful.
educated_foo - 2004-09-02T21:45:49 (permalink)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful.
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DP-Perl
(0.101)
Some of the subtlest CPAN comedy I've seen in years. For full effect, take a look at the source, not just the web documentation.
Unfortunately, his later work in DP::Date doesn't compare.
educated_foo - 2003-12-13T17:30:45 (permalink)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful.
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Data-Dumper
(2.101)
I used to think Data::Dumper was the bee's knees for data inspection, but I've recently found that YAML is often more readable. Data::Denter is supposed to be useful for data structure debugging as well, but I haven't had a chance to use it.
Oh, and for serialization, Storable is probably a better option.
Still, probably a "must-have" module.
/s
educated_foo - 2003-08-18T11:19:47 (permalink)
1 out of 5 found this review helpful.
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Emacs-EPL
(0.7)
Two great things that (could) go great together -- Emacs and Perl talking to each other through a pipe. There's good support for calling in both directions, and the code seems well-thought-out (e.g. circular data structures are properly serialized). I say "could" because the support is incomplete, e.g. hashes can only be passed as opaque references. However, this module's still fun, useful, and fun to use.
Check it out.
/s
educated_foo - 2003-08-15T18:30:23 (permalink)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful.
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Heap
(0.50)
Well-documented, with a complete interface, but I can't recommend it because:
1 - At least to me, it's too awkward to use. From the doc:
use Heap::Elem::Num(NumElem);
foreach $i ( 1..100 ) {
$elem = NumElem( $i );
$heap->add( $elem );
}
2 - Its implicit performance claims are misleading -- while Fibonacci heaps
are fast asymptotically, they are so complex that even in C, you are better
off with a normal heap for moderate amounts of data. A pure Perl
implementation of a Fibonacci heap isn't all that useful -- it's likely to be
slower than using Perl's pure-C sort builtin.
If I needed a Heap module off CPAN, I'd use Ton Hospel's Heap::Simple.
/s
educated_foo - 2003-08-15T07:53:49 (permalink)
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