I have wanted to know the function call counts (provided it is available) as well as the sample counts. Are cool colors intuitive for this? A large warm frame would mean many samples and many calls (eg, called by parent function in a hot loop), whereas a large cool frame would mean many samples and few calls (heavy compute). I don’t have a better suggestion: is there something intuitive that would convey compute vs frequency? I would find this information useful, of course. :-)

But why not make the colors convey some useful information too? (e.g. “cool” colors when a sub is only called once or a few times, and gradually warmer colors as the call amount goes up?)

Extending the idea, instead of “I’d use module::A over module::B”, more useful would be “I’d use module::A over module::B, for task X. And perhaps this could be combined with the tagging idea, raised by a number of people.

For example, considering all the modules related to defining constants: All modules might be tagged “constants”. Modules like Const::Fast and Readonly might also be tagged with “immutable variables”. Modules like constant and Constant::Generate might also be tagged with “constant functions”, etc.

Instead of, or more likely in addition to, the comment field, there could be a shorter text field (max 25 chars, say) for specifying the “scope” in which you think module::A is a better choice than module::B.

As well as typing your own in, it would have a drop-down menu for selecting from previously used ones. Then essentially people are tagging two modules at a time.

This could use the keywords field from the meta spec. If the module author has provided a keyword, then this might be presented as the default tag when suggesting an alternative. MetaCPAN could also let people tag modules, without having to specify an alternative, and could support basic curation, so you could say that immutable variables was the same thing as the oxymornic constant variables.

Together these would really enable a much richer MetaCPAN search experience.

I use Visual FoxPro. Is it a good language? I think it is pretty good for what I use it for. Is its popularity relevant to what I use it for? Not very.

Does popularity of languages really vary that much month to month? I find it very difficult to believe that it does.

We looked at carton but it didn’t really scratch the particular itch we had.