I was going through the solutions to the expert Perl Quiz of the Week when I came across Mark Jason Dominus' commentary regarding the Mail::Box::MH module. To wit, he states:
That sounds like a joke, doesn't it? Say "use Mail::Box::MH" and you load *seventy* modules.
I tend to agree that loading seventy modules seems a little excessive; however, where do we define the cut-off point? The common refrain in most programming circles is to re-use a module rather than write your own. The Mail::Box::MH module obviously adheres to this mantra, since it pulls in seventy helper modules.
As another example, I use the Class::DBI module all the time when doing database work. Class::DBI uses thirty-two modules. For what Class::DBI does, I feel it's a fair trade-off.
As an aside, eight of the required modules are actually part of Class::DBI itself, so we should count that as one module. That still leaves twenty-five other required modules. I also do not consider the base, strict, vars, and warnings modules as problematic since virtually every Perl module will include this modules. Therefore, there are still twenty-one other modules required by Class::DBI.
perl -l -MClass::DBI -e 'print join "\n", keys %INC' | sort | uniq __OUTPUT__ /usr/lib/perl/5.8.2/auto/Storable/autosplit.ix AutoLoader.pm Carp.pm Class/Accessor.pm Class/DBI.pm Class/DBI/Column.pm Class/DBI/ColumnGrouper.pm Class/DBI/Query.pm Class/DBI/Relationship.pm Class/DBI/Relationship/HasA.pm Class/DBI/Relationship/HasMany.pm Class/DBI/Relationship/MightHave.pm Class/Data/Inheritable.pm Class/Trigger.pm Config.pm DBI.pm DynaLoader.pm Exporter.pm Exporter/Heavy.pm Fcntl.pm Ima/DBI.pm List/Util.pm Scalar/Util.pm Storable.pm UNIVERSAL/moniker.pm XSLoader.pm base.pm overload.pm strict.pm vars.pm warnings.pm warnings/register.pm
What do other monks think? How many modules can one module require before it is considered too many? Given the speed of today's computers and the amount of memory they have, is this question academic?