A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

daerr just posted some interesting graphs that measure changes in the CPAN's activity rates over the last decade or so. (CPAN being Perl's distributed, internet-based archive of code libraries and other stuff, and approximately 51 percent of what makes Perl my favorite programming language.)

I'm interested to see that the number of new users started to drop off a few years ago, but the activity of existing users has been increasing so much that the archive's overall activity continues to trend upwards.

If I had to guess a single reason for this, it'd involve the community getting better over the last several years at corralling many hackers together into large, frequently updated projects, which then get stored in the CPAN under a single username (as that's a limitation of the system). I think, for example, of DBIx::Class's recent ascendency, and clear community dominance, over the thousand SQL-abstraction modules that came before it. So you have fewer instances of people creating new CPAN author accounts just to upload their own wheel-reinventions.