Recent posts by skyknight and in particular some of the responses given have inspired me to write this post.

It can be said (with a fair degree of certainty) that Perl's killer app is CPAN. I have never before seen such a vast repository of code which is free for the taking. Now sure, a lot of it is just pure crap, but a decent enough percentage of it is not (and by decent, I would say 20-30 percent). Sure, its hard to tell the difference sometimes, but things like the CPAN rating system, CPAN-testers and the Phalanax project are a step in the right direction (even though they are still in their early stages).

But I think that sometimes people forget that CPAN didn't get to be what it is overnight. CPAN is an organic thing, and like most things organic, is best grown in a bed of rich soil mixed with a healthy dose of crap (a.k.a. fertilizer). Because one never knows when the next Module::Everyone::Loves might spring from this layer of code-fertilizer (as many others have before).

Other recent discussions (which have not started out about whether the phrase "Software Engineering" is an affront to Engineers, but have evolved into it) have convinced me that the Art of Software Components is really still in its infancy, and quite possibly still has a very long way to go. And I am sure that anyone who has been subject to the torture of using some of the many "Off-The-Shelf" components (whose companies have bigger marketing budgets than development budgets) will back me up on this.

This brings me around to my main point. CPAN and the Modules::Everyone::Loves are no more examples of the pinnacle of the evolutionary process than we Homo Sapiens are. There is always room for improvement, and I believe that there should always be room for Mouse::Trap::Better to be uploaded to CPAN, even if it really should be called Mouse::Trap::Worse.

And for those whom building modules isn't their thing, there are many other ways to contribute to the Evolution. The Phalanax project is an excellent, excellent, excellent way to spend you time. I recently had a week to kill between projects, and was able to convince my boss to let me volunteer some of my time to Phalanax. I spent a week helping to clean up DBI's test suite. My boss immediately saw the value since we use DBI for just about every project we do. This site too is a great way to contribute (but I don't need to tell any of you that). The CPAN ratings guys have a to-do list posted. CPAN testers I am sure can always use another CPU to thrash around.

Seriously folks, if we all work together, we can build a better tomorrow :)

Now come one, everybody sing along to the CPAN National Anthem.....

-stvn

In reply to RFC: Mouse::Trap::Better.pm (Viva La Evolution!) by stvn

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