> And you don't believe how many people like this are out
> there (not related to Perl, but in every area)!

This is the core point i was making. You have people who couldn't care less about their tool in every human endeavour. You knowing some doesn't mean that on average Perl devs don't love it.

To elaborate a bit more: At my last $work i was in a team of four, who preferred to use bash for most things. This however was borne from a sheer lack of knowledge and once i showed them how to get real work done with Perl they started to prefer it.

> A forum, bugtracker or other means of collaboration
> software is far better suited for this, IMO.

There is a bug tracker attached to each project. Them having old bugs in there does not mean that they're being ignored, just that the author is lacking round tuits.

Also, there is a cpan annotation thing. Unsure of how much it's used. I must admit: CPAN's biggest weakness is that search.cpan.org is closed source. However metacpan is trying to fix that and has made huge strides. :)

> "there is nothing like it" states that CPAN is unique
> in every way, and it is not!

It is a question of scale. Is a 5% match in similary enough to say that it's "like it"?

> I don't want to ask around for two weeks

I have never needed more than two hours to get feedback on a module in #perl. In fact, i was once trolled for taking more than 5 minutes to accept that XML::Simple is crap.

> Config::Simple (is it crap too? i don't know now anymore)

Yes it is. Note how it has not been touched since 2005. As i mentioned: Config::INI::Reader/Writer are preferrable nowadays.

> So a module is stopped being developed and determined
> as being crap but how do i know that from the look at
> CPAN?!

We are a community. You look at the reviews to see if there's anything obvious (I just added one: http://cpanratings.perl.org/dist/Config-Simple ) and if the module looks sketchy (long ago since last release, bugs open) you ask on IRC if better solutions have come around in the meantime. As mentioned, you'll get speedy answers.

> A TOP100 of most active modules?

I like this idea. I have the feeling i've seen something like that before, but i'm not sure. I think the best solution would be to be able to order the search results by date.

> Tried that, but somehow it didn't work for everything,
> i'm not sure if some module was misbehaving.

It's lexical and only applies for your code. If you wish to capture warnings in third-party code, the cleanest solution is to wrap it in Capture::Tiny. :)

> Try to remove an item in the middle.

Is this nice enough?

@list = grep { $_ ne 'dogfood' } @list;

> Unforunately i have read this statement in a magazine
> about Perl 6 and some tutorials for it.

Ah, ok then. Honestly, i can accept that, i just would've liked to see more. Then again, not everyone writing about Perl 6 actually know a lot.

> Sorry to have wasted your time, then.

Nah, it's fine. You allow me to demonstrate more powerful perl to the casual reader.

> This doesn't change my mind, though.

This is a problem though. You've already decided that no matter what i say, you will remain stubborn.

> Rest assured that i had this discussion with other IT
> guys in the past and i'm not alone.

How many people think Britney Spears made amazing music? Appeal to majority is not always a good idea.