You Need a Tool to Search Inside Your Standard Library

Today, programming languages have so much big standard libraries that it’s a pain to know everything: one of my programming teacher (a C and C++ addict) told me that the thing that hurts him with Java and .Net was the huge standard library and the difficulty of having a good knowledge of these toolkits. Maybe he was right, and that documentation is sometimes a kind of unusable garbage, or even disappearing (for example when Oracle moved everything about Java to random locations).

However, it can be a bigger pain to re-write something that already exists than to learn and build easy tools to search for information inside the standard library. A tool that allow to search for common modules names (like URI manipulation or JSON or IO, anything). It’s sometimes too long to search on metacpan.org and on perl.org when you just need to use something in your code. This problem also comes from bad (human) memory, you can’t remember all these tools that you used only a few times. You can even less remember oneliners with more than 20 chars…

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