I quite agree, but doing it right requires a sense of balance, and a degree of self-knowledge - it usually isn't a good idea to try to reinvent every wheel.

In my case, my main interests drive me to constantly reinvent templating modules and database abstractions, and after 10 years of that I feel I'm close to understanding why it is difficult to design the perfect abstraction within those domains, and what I might be able to do about it.

Nonetheless, I'm happy to grab code from others when it solves a problem that I'm either not particularly interested in (Email::Valid for example) or one that is not core enough to my work to justify the effort of reinventing it (say Math::BigInt).

Regrettably I think it is in the nature of a community such as this to be inherently conservative. I was going to give the recent discussion of CGI::Builder as a perfect example, provoking some vitriol but no noticeable analysis of why the author had chosen to code in so non-standard a fashion, but checking it I see that the discussion has continued in a more useful vein since I last saw it (prompted in part by the appearance of the author), so perhaps there is hope yet.

But in any case radicals and revolutionaries don't tend to build large stable systems providing help to thousands of perl users. :)

Hugo