VOTE TRANSPARENT

Re: Re: Moose Or No Moose

Chris Prather recently asked "who is generally complaining about the slings and arrows of outrageous dependencies", which got me thinking (and I will get back to that thought in a moment).

Dave Cross also left a comment on my last blog post clarifying the relationship between his Array::Compare module and Test::Warn. Seems that the author of Test::Warn actually removed the usage of Array::Compare in a dev release several months ago, but simply forgot to remove it from the META.yml dependency listing. While I still think it is important to look downstream before you port to Moose, this clarification got me thinking as well.

Next comes Jonathan Rockway and his emacs fetish. Jonathan left a comment on Dave's blog which if you didn't know Jonathan, might be mistaken for an attempt to ignite the eternal Emacs vs. VI flamewar. But if you look beyond the emacs fanboi-ness of the comment you will see that Jonathan is (as usual) really making an excellent point about Padre, its extensibility as an editor, its dependencies and the choices its authors are making in relation to those things. This got me thinking about what Moose might be able to bring to the Parde party, good or bad.

So, now for my thoughts ...

To answer Chris's question, there are at least the two people who commented in the RT bug. The first is Adam Kennedy, who loves all things fast and tiny and has long complained about Moose's appetite for CPU and memory. And the second is Mark Stosberg who is a big advocate of vanilla CGI on which he and I have long disagreed. It is not surprising that neither of them like Moose. Are they representative of some kind of majority? Or just religious extremists worshipping at the altar of slim computing? It is hard to say, they both have valid concerns, but history and trends are pretty clear in how bloated software and ever improving hardware are constantly pushing one another forward (Moore's Law FTW).

So, as I said before, I agree-to-disagree with Adam and on his points, but the more I think about it, I think perhaps he is just knee-jerking here and possibly even using RT in anger. In the RT bug he says

This adds a huge amount of additional dependencies

Now sure this is true in relation to Array::Compare, but we all know that Adam is really talking about Padre. This is a little ridiculous considering Moose (on 5.10.0) has only 21 depenencies, 6 of which are core modules and has a 92% chance of installing (it would be 100%, but List::MoreUtils is dragging us down). While Padre (also on 5.10.0) has 104 dependencies, 32 of which are core modules and only has a 24% chance of installing (and requires a threaded Perl as well). So really how many dependencies would Moose add to Padre? Of the non-core dependencies they share 5 dependencies, so 21 - 6 core - 5 shared = 10, which when added to Padre's 62 non-core deps brings the grand total to 72.

Now, you might say "Wait a minute, thats a non-trivial amount of additional dependencies", and in fact you would be correct. However, the likelyhood that Moose is already installed is fairly high and growing by the day as it's popularity increases and already popular modules like Catalyst start using it. You see, Moose is not like other CPAN modules which simply provide a specific feature for a specific need, but instead is a tool to extend the language itself and which you use to create other CPAN modules. Because of this, the chance of having Moose already installed, either directly or because you install one of the approximately 600+ modules that use it, is pretty high.

Adam's next point about startup time is valid, this has long been an issue with Moose. We have made great strides on this issue over the years, but there is still a ways to go. How much this truly affects Padre though is debatable, as Jonathan Rockway pointed out, how many times a day/week/month are you really going to be starting up your text editor? Is startup time for a featureful IDE with possibly many plugins really that big of a deal? It certainly hasn't seemed to slow down the adoption for things like Eclipse.

And finally, to Adam's last comment ...

If this can't be fixed, we're going to need to remove Array::Compare (and everything that uses it) from Padre

this was actually the part that concerned me most because of what Adam is saying to all the authors of Padre's 62 non-core dependencies. While I do believe CPAN developers should look downstream before adding dependencies in the spirit of being a good neighbor, I think it is a little unreasonable for those upstream to dictate what is and is not an acceptable dependency.

Sure Dave's Array::Compare is a straightforward module and the benefits Moose brought to it were fairly minimal. But there are some pretty complex modules in Padre's dependency list, many of which could probably benefit greatly from Moose. And what about Padre plugins? Are they allowed to use Moose? What if they become popular plugins and the Padre folks want to merge them into the core? Do they have to shed the Moose before being allowed in? Where does this insanity end!?!?!

See, Moose is growing in popularity a lot lately. The number of CPAN modules that use Moose have been growing at a very steady pace. The #moose@irc.perl.org channel regularly has over 200 people in it. If you read the Perl Ironman blogs, you have no doubt seen a lot of Moose there lately. The number of Moose related questions on Perlmonks has been increasing lately (I should know I answer many of them). There were 16 talks at YAPC::NA this year tagged with Moose (including a 6 hour Moose course) which made Moose one of the largest tags in the cloud. This was followed by 7 talks at YAPC::EU this year.There will be approx 5 or so talks at the upcoming YAPC::Asia (including the Moose course again given by Sartak). Dave Rolsky will be giving a Moose course at the Italian Perl Workshop. Moose is also central to the EPO's extended core effort. We even get a fair amount of twitter traffic (for whatever that is worth).

Because of this, I really think Moose has proved itself not to be just a fad, especially considering this momentum has been steadily growing over 3 and a half years now. While it might be reasonable of Adam to request upstream deps not use Moose right now, how much longer before this becomes a real problem for Padre? Will the culture of NIH set in? Should Padre embrace the Moose future now? Has anyone even benchmarked/profiled how much of an impact Moose would have on Padre?

So Internets, what do you think?

YAPC::NA Moose Hackathon

We are planning a Moose hackathon after YAPC::NA this year. It should be a nice compliment to Dave Rolsky's Moose course as well as the several Moose related talks on the schedule, so if you can stay an extra day or two in Pittsburgh come and hang out and talk/hack some Moose.