I love browsing and/or buying books on Amazon.com. Part of the reason is that there are no lack of ratings/reviews on the books, helping me decide on which books to choose on a certain topic. On CPAN however, despite cpanratings.perl.org having been online for more than a decade, most modules have no reviews.

I've done my share of commenting/reviewing modules, but some things could be improved.

First, whenever some other modules are mentioned in a review, it should perhaps be shown as reviews/mentions for that module. For example, just…

Suppose we use books as analogies for Perl (CPAN) modules.

Do we want CPAN to be some sort of an ISBN authority, where we merely dole out namespaces and unique IDs? There should be no requirements of content or any editorial activity on the modules. We should not discourage (nor encourage?) experimental modules or implemetations, modules for personal or semi-private use, etc.

Do we want CPAN to be some sort of a publisher? There would be some editors in charge to determine which modules are worthy of publishing and which are not (yet). The question is, who? There can hardly be a conse…

Let's try to predict when we will be able to {conveniently,realistically,sensibly} use Perl 6 to build real-world applications. Note: this post is just the result of its author's pondering and is not meant to be negative towards Perl 6.