This is interesting.

Perhaps you read, or skimmed, the story linked off of Slashdot about the module count for Ruby growing to eclipse the module count for Perl? First things first: it's wrong.

Second: is measuring module count useful? In some respects it is. A community with 10 modules would seem to be less active than a community with 1000 modules. But given the number of modules in each of the 'big' communities (Perl, Ruby, Python) it seems less useful as a metric. So what would be a good metric? Module quality? Module popularity? How can those be measured?