I was wondering why is it that when I search for any CGI or Perl script on the net (using popular search engines), the highest ranked result will be for Matt's Scripts Archive (!) although this guy does not use Perl correctly and probably copied the scripts from a book.
why is that no big names like merlyn and Vroom ... and the others do not appear there, although these are the people who contribute greatly in the Perl community??

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Re: Searches
by merlyn (Sage) on Feb 17, 2001 at 19:33 UTC
    Matt Wright came along at a time when the masses were hungry for "plug-n-play" solutions. His poorly coded perl4-style solutions quickly satisfied the crowd.

    My web techniques column archive gets many thousands of hits a week, but I'm not playing to the crowd -- I'm playing to the web architecture designer. My stuff's not plug-n-play... you have to have at least half a brain to use them. And those with half a brain or more do in fact know to use my columns as resources, and refer others there frequently.

    So the masses still get the oatmeal they deserve, while the connoisseurs like us can dine on fine meat and wines. I have no problem with that.

    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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      Kind of makes you wonder, though, if there isn't a market for "plug and play" style solutions that aren't so terribly bad as the one's on Matt's site. I mean, like how hard is it to put up (say) a basic, no frills, easy to setup guestbook that does not (at worst) open your server to obvious security holes or (at best) continue a culture of poor programming?

      But I think you're right... Matt's Archive has become a meme that just won't go away, no matter how substandard it is.

      Gary Blackburn
      Trained Killer

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        I remember a project mentioned on comp.lang.perl.misc about a year ago to rewrite some of the horrid scripts out there. I don't know if this ever made it out of the planning stages. Unfortunately, they called the project CRAP. I'm not sure what the acronym stood for, but it makes it almost impossible to find any information about it via the usual web searches.

        As an aside, maybe we should create some basic tutorials on how to create a guestbook, form mailer, page counter, etc. since these things come up pretty often for new users. It seems like the monastery would be the perfect place for such a thing since we have a wealth of good programmers and an incredibly effective peer review system.

        ----
        Coyote

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        Yikes! I typed "guestbook perl" into google.com and sure enough the top link returned was a guestbook that said it was written with code from Matt's Script Archive.

        If even Google.com, which I consider the prince of search engines, gets it wrong then what hope is there?

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      " If you make something even an idiot can use,
      an idiot will use it. "
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Re: Searches
by arhuman (Vicar) on Feb 17, 2001 at 16:51 UTC

    Probably beccause AFAIK neither merlyn nor vroom have such archive and Matt's script Archive was well referenced.

    But CPAN or the monastery is a good place to start if you're looking for good stuff.

    UPDATE : Oops I'm wrong for merlyn, see his post below.
    (hope vroom hasn't a hidden page with scripts somewhere otherwise I'll be in trouble ;-)
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Re: Searches
by Chady (Priest) on Feb 17, 2001 at 19:28 UTC
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