TROLLING Finished polishing your last script? Have a little time to kill? Feeling ignored? Just hop over to PerlMonks and start a thread about ... oh about anything, really, it doesn't matter, but be sure to include a phrase that matches /not \s+ use \s+ CPAN .* module/xms. Poking a fire ant mound with a stick is about the closest equivalent to the mindless swarming and biting this will provoke.
AD HOC BAYESIAN ADVICE FILTERING Say you value PerlMonks for its wisdom and advice, then you are left with a problem: What advice is good? How can you tell? This problem is a social network analog to that of email spam. Here is a heuristic on how to proceed:
Get a pad of paper and a pencil
Troll a thread as per the point above, but include an actual valid reason for not using CPAN. Two reasons that strangers are never able to gainsay without some claim to omniscience are, "My company won't allow it," and "I cannot have external dependencies". There are others.
Come back to the thread in about a day. Write down the user names of the responses and weight them as you will. Remember, the point is not to mark down people for advocating CPAN, but to mark down people for mindlessly advocating CPAN.
Keep this list of weighted user names next to your computer or taped to the laptop case. Refer to it when in doubt about the probable sagacity inherent in a future post.
For the advanced learner, send a quick email to Paul Graham asking how he'd automate this. Then open a thread asking monks to help translate some lisp code to perl. Be sure to mention that the conversion can't use CPAN modules....
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
