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.
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Obviously you're right that using someone else's good work is beneficial. But I personally believe you're making too general a statement. As you've written it, you aren't really saying code re-use is good, you're saying only code-reuse is good.
This is the same fabulous rhetoric, "Don't reinvent the wheel." There would be no Perl at all if Larry had taken these adages to heart b/c he could have re-used the shells, C, awk, and sed and pretty much covered what the first few versions of Perl did and then some. If one can make a wheel 5% better by putting in 10,000 times the work, does it make a fool? I don't care if my neighbor spends all day working on wheels. I'm not obligated to use any of them. Perhaps s/he'll hit on a nice one and might share.
Lots of kids here would probably cringe if I said, "I just wrote this great script. It has 42,000 lines of code and runs great." That's what we do when we import 50 modules. Or even 10 that each import a couple families. Many modules are so completely generalized to be portable that they contain scads of things you never use but have to pay for the loading of anyway. Date::Manip is one of my favorite modules but I've had it bring down a corporate intranet from a well-used CGI. It helped write the app quickly but it had to come out when the app was finally in full swing.
I have a module I am working on as a drop in replacement for CGI.pm's HTML routines because I like them so well but don't need anything else since I've got Apache::Request to cover param() and so on. Is it better than CGI.pm? No way. Is it as well tested? No and never could be. Is it as well written? Not particularly, not yet. Is it faster? Benchmark says, 200-500%. And I could have used the very nice HTML::AsSubs instead, but at a speed penalty of 2000%.
Will this module ever be persuasive enough to make it into production applications or to CPAN? Maybe not, but I think other mod_perl kids might like to have it since I'd like to so it's worth trying out.
I really love to write code, sometimes even when it is destined for the bit-bucket. It somtimes seems like many Perl hackers hate to write anything except sig blocks. :)
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