Back in March, I mentioned that I was working on a new OO tutorial for the Perl 5 core. I’ve been working this intermittently over the last eight months or so, with lots of useful feedback from the perl5-porters. Along the way, the project grew to include a rewrite of the perlobj document, the reference document for Perl OO.
I’m happy to say that as of last week, all of my work has been merged into the blead branch of core, and will be in the next release of Perl.
Here’s what I did …
We now have an entirely new OO tutorial. This tutorial has two parts. The first is an introduction to OO concepts. Some people may come to Perl without a background in another OO language, so defining basic concepts is important. This part defines these concepts in terms of how Perl implements them, so even if the reader has some OO background, skimming this section will still be useful.
The second half introduces three OO systems from CPAN and gives short examples of how to use each one. In 2011, it just doesn’t make any sense to tell people how to roll their own OO code in a tutorial. The systems I wrote about are Moose, Class::Accessor, and Object::Tiny. I also mention Role::Tiny, since roles are awesome, and you shouldn’t have to use Moose to use roles.
When I merged this tutorial, I deleted all the old tutorials. Those were perltoot (Tom’s object-oriented tutorial for perl), perltooc (Tom’s OO Tutorial for Class Data in Perl), perlboot (Beginner’s Object-Oriented Tutorial). I also removed perlbot (Bag o’ Object Tricks (the BOT)). All of these were extremely outdated and contained a number of dubious recommendations.
Don’t take this as a criticism of Tom, Randal, or other people who worked hard on those docs. They were great when they were written, but the state of the art in Perl OO has changed a lot in the past 10-15 years. If Perl 5 is still in use 10 years from now, someone will be deleting my tutorial then!
I also revised perlobj. Some of the old content remains, but it has been rewritten, reordered, and expanded. I hope that it is now a 100% complete reference to core Perl OO features.
If anyone reading this has any constructive feedback on these docs, I’d love to hear it. I really want to get these new docs into excellent shape before Perl 5.16 ships in spring of 2012.
Comments
stevenharyanto.myopenid.com, on 2011-09-14 20:17, said:
Is Moo considered not worth mentioning? It has about the same number of CPAN distributions depending on it as Object::Tiny, and it provides more features.
Dave Rolsky, on 2011-09-14 20:35, said:
@Steven: I think Moo is still too experimental. IIRC, mst was actually the one who suggested covering Class::Accessor and Object::Tiny in addition to Moose.
If Moo becomes a contender, it can always be given a mention later.
Robert, on 2011-09-14 20:51, said:
Read it…it was good. Very cool
Joel Berger, on 2011-09-14 23:45, said:
FWIW, I really like perltoot, I think it could be the most relevant old-school perl OO doc. I still refer to it now and again. Remember Moose still builds a hashref-based object, same as in perltoot. So possibly for no other reason than for helping to read old code, I wouls leave perltoot in. Again what I say probably bears no weight, but what does it cost?
OTOH, thanks for writing some new docs, can’t wait to read them over!
Dave Rolsky, on 2011-09-15 00:09, said:
@Joel: I think that everything covered by perltoot is still covered in perlobj.
Yes, Moose builds a hashref based object, but the whole point of Moose is that you don’t have to worry about the details. Why, in 2011, would we inflict that level of detail on someone trying to learn Perl OO for the first time?
Alexander Hartmaier (abraxxa), on 2011-09-15 01:46, said:
I’ve just read it and found the OO module comparison very helpful, especially the examples showing their syntaxes.
Thanks, that’s a great step forward for the Perl documentation!
I’ve never understood why there are so many different docs on that topic.
ranguard, on 2011-09-15 02:55, said:
Fantastic - thanks so much for this
Nigel Metheringham, on 2011-09-15 04:18, said:
Hi,
Read the tutorial - good stuff.
Found a typo - have fixed and sent pull request on github, however if you want grab and merge that more directly, its at
https://github.com/nigelm/perl/commit/dc8de09b826f16289322647b89659b0a997e292a
Dave Rolsky, on 2011-09-15 09:00, said:
@Nigel: We don’t actually use github to manage Perl. See the perlhack for docs on how to submit patches.
I just linked to github because they format the pod nicely.
Peter Sergeant, on 2011-09-15 10:20, said:
I haven’t checked, but have you left stubs in those places? I imagine there are many places that refer people to ‘perldoc perlboot’ or ‘perldoc perltoot’, and it’d be a shame if they weren’t updated to point somewhere new…
pdonelan.myopenid.com, on 2011-09-15 15:25, said:
So awesome that you took the time to do this.
Mark Stosberg, on 2011-09-15 22:09, said:
Thanks!
Satish, on 2011-09-23 13:43, said:
Hi,
Thanks for such a great work!!!!
hanekomu, on 2011-10-04 06:33, said:
Very nice work! I also thought having so many OO docs was confusing.
I wonder about the inclusion of Role::Tiny, because that’s part of Moo, which, as you say, is still experimental.
How about including Role::Basic instead? There, the idea of a role really lives on its own. Just for reference, I’ve used Role::Basic as the core of Brickyard, a role-based plugin system I wrote for a fair-sized application at work (domain name registry).
Anyway, thank you!