Item 67. Mitigate the risk of public code

Think before you download that CPAN module! It might look simple enough at first, but what else do you have to do? Are there fragile dependencies, an unresponsive maintainer, or many unresolved bugs? What are you getting yourself into by committing to that module?

It might seem like heresy to suggest that you not use a CPAN module, but that’s not really what’s going on here. No one else can make your decision for you, since they probably don’t know everything that goes into your problem. Your economic inputs might be different from somebody else’s. Providing real-time financial data to a trader has different requirements than offline analysis of Web server traffic, and with that comes a different risk tolerance.