I guess back then declarative syntax just wasn’t that popular in Perl land as it is today, so there was some resistance. Also, there was no namespace::clean, Devel::Declare or other modern tools and DBIC itself was still fairly new.

I also did a second attempt (this time with mst’s blessing) which was much more convoluted and involved Moose-style declarations. It should be possible to find it in the old DBIC SVN repositories, if they’re still online (Moose-Style-Schema-Declare branch, in case you’re interested). I eventually gave up, as it was useless to me – I just wanted a plain syntax sugar module, not anything too complex.

So, 4 years later we have DBIC::Candy. Well, I guess late is better than never.

There’s one thing which I find amusing, though. I created a very similar module back then in 2006 (it was called DBIx::Class::Sweet). It wasn’t as polished and finished as this one, but it worked in production code.

There was a hailstorm of criticism back then. The actual quote from mst was:

“It is *not* worth being an add-on package.

Please rather than just releasing pointless tiny modules to CPAN will you consider actually talking to the development teams of the respective packages?”

The tone of the email was that this should be part of DBIC and an add-on would be a bad thing.

Anyway, this is just an odd historical curiosity. I really do welcome your module, but I wonder if maybe this could’ve been available to the community at least 3 years earlier with the same degree of polish if it wasn’t for some people being too stubborn (and for me caring too much about criticism).