Re: The quantity vs. quality lesson [my MANIFESTO]

[gmpassos]

This is my MANIFESTO:

First, CPAN is free, made just by the goodwill of hundreds, ops, thousands, of developers in all the world!

Since CPAN is made by people, that don't need to ask for someone a licence to improve it, since Perl is here to always defend freedom, freedom to do what we want, from the source of our code to our ideas, CPAN will work as a ecosystem, that have good and bad things.

A developer to create it's 1st module need to start from some point, a point where the probability to build something that is a "crap", as you said, is huge. But since it's free to make this module and improve it, and to show it's "crap" to the world, it can learn how to build better things.

We also can get the "crap" of other people, take a deep look in that, and find something useful to use with our modules or project, or just to send some upgrades to the author of the "crap".

But the most important thing is, what is "crap" for one can be gold for other! This is valid for any system, from CPAN to our global ecosystem. So, who can think that is God to tell what is good or bad? No one! Just no one! At least I don't have courage to say that the work of someone, hours or not, is "crap" and need to be banish from the world! Well, history knows some crazy man that thought that was God, and his name was Hitler, and this man really made CRAP, not creating "crap", but trying to say what is crap and banishing what it doesn't like from the world. Today we know that this man was a real CRAP, but in hist time, hundreds, ops, thousands of thousands, of people thought that it was the better and thought that this man knew what it was doing. What was a shame...

You pointed a important thing, the value of the things in CPAN. Well, we can't control the things that we have in CPAN or we can kill the start point of very good ideas, or maybe kill very good developers. What we really have, is some difficulty to find a good module, or the best module, to do what we want. Well, we are still free to try any module in CPAN, and we have http://cpanratings.perl.org. I can guarantee that is better to test 10 modules and can choose what is best for what I need, that have only 1 module, that some "coporation" says that is the best made by the better, and have only one solution projected for only one problem.

Actually the first man to point that was Darwing. Darwing showed to us that nature, in million of years, chose a very good strategy called diversity. Diversity will guarantee that a species have much more ways to vanquish a challenge presented by the nature if this species have more diversity. But this is valid for all the levels, from a species to all the ecosystem. This is how every life in this world was build, including us.

So, I prefer to think that maybe CPAN depends of diversity to exists as a system that can resolve almost all the problems that the world shows. ;-P

And think that someone have all the wisdom needed to can analyze what can be banished or not from the world just because it's not good enough is just very stupid, since let the evolution work is much more smart.

And don't forget, if you don't like a module that you "buy" from CPAN, ask for your money back! Stop to think that you win something as the judge of CPAN modules, and star to test them before choose what you will use! Than vote for it on cpanrating to show to the others that it's good. Or help that main author to improve his module. If you don't like this ideas, just let me remember you that this is how the Perl community was made, including CPAN. And if some day someone start to kill modules from CPAN just because they think that it's not good enough I will be the 1st to create FCPAN, Free Comprehensive Perl Archive Network!!!! CPAN is much more big than you think, much more big that any of us! It has 3650 authors and 6443 modules! Have you tried all this module to can say the amount of crap on it?! You are just saing things before really know about what you are talking.

I prefer to have 900 good modules in 10000 modules (9% of quality), that have only 90 module in 100 (90% of quality), since more modules don't create problems for the other modules or authors! Diversity is the key!!!!

[flyingmoose]

I prefer to have 900 good modules in 10000 modules (9% of quality), that have only 90 module in 100 (90% of quality)

Who is to say this is the bar? This is a weak argument. The problem with CPAN is it lies in anarchy as compared to other languages "core", and often it is hackish or bug-ridden or incomplete, or documentation is woefully inaccurate or missing. And this is somehow ok. Well, yes, CPAN is a public happy place... but there is this phenomenon of the "tragedy of the commons", and CPAN is thus full of proverbial space junk. Can we fix it? Yes. Should we? Perhaps not... but we need to raise the bar and move to a more Debian-like system of maintainers -- and a system where orphaned packages can be adopted if the owner is gone. We should also work on solid frameworks to limit the "TIMTOWTDI" phenomenon. More than one way is fine, but I don't want incompatibile ways ... i.e. this module has an OO interface, this one doesn't, this one uses this module ... it just results in code looking sloppy. Perl is a very powerful language, but I wish the community had higher standards. I'm not embarassed for asking for it, and this isn't a knock at Perl.

[gmpassos]

Maybe is time to do this on Perl6! How about a CPAN for Perl6? Actually need to be for Parrot, since Parrot is much more that only Perl6.