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package Acme::OneHundredNotOut;
our $VERSION = "100";

=pod

=head1 NAME

Acme::OneHundredNotOut - A raise of the bat, a tip of the hat

=head1 TEXT

I have just released my 100th module to CPAN, the first time that anyone
has reached that target. As some of you may know, I am getting ready to
go back to college and reinvent myself from being a programmer into
being a missionary. I don't forsee that many more Perl modules coming
out of this.

Of course, this doesn't mean that I'm going to abjure usage of Perl
forever; any time there's a computer and something I need automated, out
will come the Swiss Army Chainsaw and the job will get done. In fact, we
recently needed to manipulate some text from a mission handbook to
translate it into Japanese, and Perl was there handling and collating
all that.

But 100 modules is a convenient place to stop and take stock, and I hope
that those of you who have benefitted from my modules, programs or
writing about Perl will forgive me a certain spot of self-indulgence as
I look back over my CPAN career, especially since I feel that the
diversity of modules that I've produced is a good indication of the
diversity of what can be done with Perl.

Let's begin, then, with some humble beginnings, and then catch up on
recent history.

=head2 The Embarrassing Past

Contrary to popular belief, I was not always a CPAN author. I started
writing modules in 1998, immediately after reading the first edition of
the Perl Cookbook - yes, you can blame Nat and Tom for all this. The
first module that I released was L<Tie::DiscoveryHash>, since I'd just
learnt about tied hashes. As with many of my modules, it was an integral
part of another software project which I actually never finished, and
now can't find. 

The first module that I ever B<wrote> (but, by a curious quirk of fate,
precisely the fiftieth module I released) was called L<String::Tokeniser>,
which is still a reasonably handy way of getting an iterator over
tokenising a string. (Someone recently released C<String::Tokenizer>,
which makes me laugh.) This too was for an abortive project, C<webperl>,
an application of Don Knuth's WEB system of structured documentation to
Perl. However, given the code quality of these two modules, it's perhaps
just as well that the projects never saw the light of day.

There are a few other modules I'd rather like to forget, too.
C<Devel::Pointer> was a sick joke that went badly wrong - it allowed
people to use pointers in Perl. Some people failed to notice that
referring to memory locations directly in an extremely high-level
language was a dangerous and silly thing to do, and actually used the
damned thing, and I started getting requests for support for it. Then at
some point in 2001, when I should really have known better, I developed
an interest in Microsoft's .NET and the C# language, which I still think
is pretty neat; but I decided it might be a good idea to translate the
Mono project's tokenizer and parser into Perl, ending up with
L<C::Sharp>. I never got around to doing the parser part, or indeed
anything else with it, and so it died a lonely death in a dark corner of
CPAN. L<GTK::HandyClist> was my foray into programming graphical
applications, which started and ended there. L<Bundle::SDK::SIMON> was
actually the slides from a talk on my top ten favourite CPAN modules -
except that this changes so quickly over time, it doesn't really make
much sense any more.

Finally, L<Array::FileReader> was an attempt to optimize a file access
process. Unfortunately, my "optimization" ended up introducing more
overheads than the naive solution. It all goes to show. Since then,
Mark-Jason Dominus, another huge influence in the development of my CPAN
career, has written C<Tie::File>, which not only has a better name but
is actually efficient too.

=head2 The Internals Phase

1999-2000 were disastrous years for me personally but magnificent years
Perl-sonally. Stuck in a boring job and a tiny flat in the middle of
Tokyo, I had plenty of time to get stuck into more Perl development. I
felt that getting involved with C<perl5-porters> would be a good way of
gettting to know more about Perl, and so I needed a hobby horse - an
issue of Perl's development that I cared about. Since I was in Japan and
working a lot with non-Latin text, Unicode support seemed a good thing
to work on, and so L<Unicode::Decompose> appeared, while I fixed up a
substantial part of the post-5.6 core Unicode support.

I'd recommend this way to anyone who wants to get more involved in the
Perl community, although I was very lucky in terms of who else happened
to be around at the time: Gurusamy Sarathy was extremely gracious in
helping me turn my fledgling C code into something fit for the Perl
core, and he also helped me understand the C<perl5-porters> etiquette
(yes, there was some at the time) and what makes a good patch, while
Jarkko Hietaniemi was always good for suggestions of interesting things
for keen people to work on. Seriously, get involved. If I can do it,