Spring is well in the air by now (in this corner of the globe anyway), and it seems to be time for the annual Spring Clean Question about the Code Catacombs (not, I hasten to add, the True Catacombs - I'm not venturing down there without a map).

The proliferation of code in the Monastery is marvellous - new programs are added to the catacombs every few days, to say nothing of CUFP's, Snippets etc. Some are useful -some not so - to take two examples sitting side-by-side in the CGI section. And there's the rub. How did I know?

Obviously, in the two cases there, it's rather obvious. Well, it is to anyone that read the comments, or voted and saw the node reputation, or understood the code. That's you lot out of the way (I generally assume that anyone reading Discussions has been to the monastery before {g} ) - but what about the rest?

Alice: "Hey - there's some neat code here that does just what my teach
+er asked me to do."
Bob: "Is it any good?"
Alice: "It's from PerlMonks - it must be. It was 4th fom the top. Some
+ people were arguing about it, but look! It works for question 3, so 
+who cares?"
Bob: "Give it here - I'll change the variable names so he won't know..
+."
[download]

There's been discussion before about the monastery disseminating Cargo Cult code. I'm not asking for a cull or anything, but I think slight improvements to the way the catacombs are indexed and presented could help matters greatly. At present, the individual sections simply list script titles - sometimes self-evident, sometimes not. The only way to find out how useful / accurate / related-to-your-problem a script might be is to read the node itself, and all the replies, and probably try it out. Great fun when you're just browsing around, but not the most comprehensive of catalogues.

If programs were simply listed with a 'standard' PM title bar, with author / reply count (and categories - useful if looking for Win32/Networking code or something), this would help. Adding the description, as in the 'New Code' section, would help further (possibly chopped at x characters, or something). And dare I say...order by reputation? That may move this out of the way of merlyn's watchful gaze. :)

Sorry for yet another "can we have shift(@my_great_ideas) in the Monastery" discussion, but monk's gotta say what a monk's gotta say. I'll leave the bigger "can we catalogue every piece of code in the building" Discussion for another year though...

Cheers,
Ben.