Perhaps it's mother's day making me prickly.

Sometimes when I look at the list of use ABC .. XYZ at the top of a script trying to creep below the fold of my poor teraterm I cringe.

I ♥ the CPAN. (I hope that entity displays right for everyone)

Sometimes when I look at the list of use ABC .. XYZ at the top of a script trying to creep below the fold of my poor teraterm I cringe.

Why? That's that many lines of code that more than one person has used, evaluated, and tested for the purpose at hand. Code re-use is a very good thing. Independent implementation is not. I even wrote a column on that (surprise {grin}).

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Increased content is only sometimes good. We increase the utility of this site when we limit how many duplicate discussions we have (hence super search), when people are encouraged to use other resources (like CPAN) pre-emptively, and when people are encouraged to work efficiently. This encourages a minimalistic approach. We also increase the utility of the site when the discussions are sufficiently interesting that more good contributers are drawn into the mix. That suggests a more verbose approach.

How to balance those out is a matter of sometimes difficult judgement calls. Even after the fact it can be a matter of debate as to whether someone succeeded. (FWIW, I thought your initial post was just fine and just wanted to comment on the idea of whether content per se was a good or bad thing...)