There are some "the module is free, you have no right to complain" replies. I disagree.

TOMMY wrote several modules. But while in principle this is laudable, many things are wrong with them. If nobody complains, problems are never fixed, people use his code, things break and Perl gets blamed for it.

I did complain. In a harsh way, but I felt like doing that when I read Handy::Dandy's source. I love Perl, and can't stand it when someone damages its reputation. (You could argue I'm not really giving the Perl *community* a good name here. I hope my other posts compensate for that.)

Via the chatterbox, I got some private messages saying that Tommy probably meant well. He probably did, but he should have communicated, to give the community a chance to respond before bad things would happen. He did not. We can only react *after* the incident. And post-facto response is never as friendly.

Had no one said anything, then Tommy would probably not even realise his mistakes and submit more broken modules to CPAN. People *will* use his code as long as it is available (see also the infamous scripts by Matt Wright), so it should be taken offline before it causes real damage (if not already).

My way of talking about this module may not be how you would have.

Would you have reviewed this differently? It's not too late to do so. Let's see if you can stay friendly while reading this module's code. I couldn't, sorry. I hope you can.

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