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in reply to Re: The quantity vs. quality lesson [my MANIFESTO]
in thread The quantity vs. quality lesson

I prefer to have 900 good modules in 10000 modules (9% of quality), that have only 90 module in 100 (90% of quality)
Who is to say this is the bar? This is a weak argument. The problem with CPAN is it lies in anarchy as compared to other languages "core", and often it is hackish or bug-ridden or incomplete, or documentation is woefully inaccurate or missing. And this is somehow ok. Well, yes, CPAN is a public happy place... but there is this phenomenon of the "tragedy of the commons", and CPAN is thus full of proverbial space junk. Can we fix it? Yes. Should we? Perhaps not... but we need to raise the bar and move to a more Debian-like system of maintainers -- and a system where orphaned packages can be adopted if the owner is gone. We should also work on solid frameworks to limit the "TIMTOWTDI" phenomenon. More than one way is fine, but I don't want incompatibile ways ... i.e. this module has an OO interface, this one doesn't, this one uses this module ... it just results in code looking sloppy. Perl is a very powerful language, but I wish the community had higher standards. I'm not embarassed for asking for it, and this isn't a knock at Perl.