It's an idea that's been raised many times before : Code Review (less than a month old), Code Review section, anyone? (seven months old). (Let me remind everyone about the search function -- it's really handy! I tracked down these links by typing "code review" and "code review section" in the search box, although of course I recalled the discussions).

To the extent that there is a consensus (and this just may be because I'm part of the group that accepts the reasoning), it's that we can use existing code sections such as Craft for these purposes. Think of it as an open workshop, where you display your work (so far) and others come in and offer suggestions for improvement.

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor

And where will all of the senior monk advice come from?

Trying to do good code reviews takes an order of magnitude more work than answering questions. Of course it provides an order of magnitude more benefit for the listener, but there are an order of magnitude fewer listeners.

My fear if there is an official section for this is that the ratio between request/assistance will be seriously skewed. (And I say this as one of the people who makes an effort to respond to requests of the form, "I would like feedback on my code.")

Good point. Code reviews are more work - however I don't necessarily think that there is an order of magnitude fewer listeners.

These are my thoughts...

This has to be voluntary - people are busy enough already without more work.

I've seen a lot of really useful techniques and tricks in the various code examples floating around - but this has been somewhat haphazard. The sheer volume of syntax in Perl means there's a steep learning curve. Don't get me wrong, this is fun, but it'd be nice to see some examples of what people think of as best practice in Perl coding. The discussions here have helped me learn a lot.

I know that best practice is a nebulous concept (best for hacking, reuse, maintability, winning obscurated contests...). Some short suggestions can help a lot when someone is starting out. On the other hand people learn better by doing, so maybe this is too much hand holding, and maybe I should let people spend some time evolving their own styles anyway.

With coding, I've learnt most of my coding style/techniques from other people - there's a lot of different examples of perlcode out there that are easily available. However these can differ markedly in style -- and unless you're at an equivalent level of experience it can be pretty hard to see why people did things the way they did. Given the complexity of the perl syntax, this can be pretty hard to do.

Partly why I'm raising these points is that I finish up shortly in a job and I need to hand my code over to relative Perl neophytes. This means I need to strike a balance between cleverness/efficiency and maintainability/readability. Having a section dedicated to code reviews/best practice etc would help me tell them 'see this is why this looks like this'.

However having said all that, it looks as if the craft section is the right place for this after all. I was concerned about the volume for requests swamping legitimate craft questions but with careful moderation that shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks for your comments all!