So hugo is working well enough although I did have a few moments where I wished I was using mason.pl instead. I adopted hugo mostly because it is still being actively developed, I could just use a theme and not bother writing any code and is just as fast as mason. Mason is irritating as it occasionally requires me to remember how to use cpan. Mason is a little too old and obscure to be properly supported by my distro’s package manager. I have deleted the whole .cpan directory and started again too many times. It always seems to work even though I always forget how to use cpan between invocations.

The “just use a theme and forget about it” mentality almost immediately went by the board. Given that I have to write templating code I really wish I could just use something closer to a standard interpreter like in ruby or in mason.pl. Mason is nice because it lets me use the mature inheritance hierarchy of Moose. Everything in hugo is just a bit more fiddly and not nearly so general. This results in more work for me. I’m hoping that ease of writing in markdown makes up for the pain in templating.