And most importantly: It provides you globalized automated testing on a variety of systems of anything you upload, through CPANTesters.

Just as an example: I uploaded a module yesterday and now it has 38 tests on as many different configurations already: http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=CGI-Application-Plugin-T...

So not only gives it a very useful and otherwise extremely expensive tool to you, the developer, it also shows you this information about other modules, so it lets you gauge the quality of the modules you are considering to use.

Edit: Also, as an additional goody: The testing culture of CPAN allows development of ancillary tools that analyze the current state of CPAN and highlight modules that are having issues with their tests: http://analysis.cpantesters.org/ This can help generate bug reports for developers who don't have time to figure out exactly why a test failed on an obscure combo and they provide an in for CPAN-Newbies by pointing out to them which distributions could use patches.

Haskell's system is called "hackage" for example and "R" has its "CRAN" and so on.

Though it's really no fair comparison as CPAN contains what.. 89033 modules? http://search.cpan.org/

I'm not very familiar with PyPi since I'm not a Python programmer, but Gems pretty much work exactly like they should. Especially when you throw RVM into the mix.

    89033 modules

Note I didn't say there is not such product/framework, just, as the articles says, they are not promoted/known.

There's a whole bunch of them, with different design goals or philosophies.

[edit] I'm gonna pick a little bit on Catalyst and do a quick surface review at website level from a non-Perlist POV.

Homepage : ok, looks nice.

Documentation : uuh ! Dry redirect to CPAN. First impression before reading, it's not the doc, it's the API doc. Ah, wait a second, it _is_ the doc. Not very appealing and some things are so not obvious that it takes a note to understand it like "Note: Click on the heading in the previous line to jump to the actual chapter. Below is a "table of contents" for this chapter."

Download : Again directly to CPAN, at first sight confusingly looks like an API doc. For newcomers not versed in Perl it is not very friendly.

Community : not much to say, a good wiki with apparently interesting stuff to read. But the first thing you see is that the "Why Catalyst is an excellent web application framework?" is an empty page.

The perl community has every reason to be proud of CPAN. It's great tool but it's not the answer to everything. It's all therem but it lacks the last mile, the 20% of polish to make it a tad more friendly/attractive.

It's the whole point of the article I think. It's not to criticize Perl, just to say it needs a better marketing strategy.

Why do people keep trotting out this stupid pointless number. How much of that is duplication? How much of it is crap? How much of it is literally toys (e.g. ACME stuff)? In any case, Java has vastly, vastly more so any language that runs on the JVM automatically beats perl here.

99% of programmers will never notice any functionality missing in Ruby or Python that CPAN has.

Metcalfe's Law. The value of the CPAN increases dramatically with every addition, especially because of the maturity of the entire CPAN infrastructure: CPAN testers, CPANTS, annotations, reviews, dependency tracking, BackPAN tracking, gitpan, linked documentation, et cetera.

Demonstrably nonsense. Let me add a new module called ACME::DoNothing. What have I increased besides disk space and a meaningless module count?

The testing stuff is good and it's the direction everyone should be going but not having it obviously isn't too much of a problem because so few systems currently have it (CPAN was successful long before it had it as well).

You can't really draw that conclusion. Other systems do not have it because it is not an easily solved problem, not because they do not think they need it.

Also, needing and benefiting from something are two entirely different things. Yes, no language actually NEEDS this kind of thing. But a language that has it is literally self-healing, since any kind of problem, be it breakages from dependencies, cross-platform issues or core language changes are communicated very rapidly to the developers without them even needing to make an effort.

The Perl 5 Porters mailing list has automated mailings which test CPAN against bleadperl to discover which, if any, commits break existing CPAN distributions. This helps p5p revert genuine mistakes and CPAN authors to patch their bugs.

I know that several minor revisions of other languages have broken several popular extension libraries.

Given human penchant to slip up and not realise problems until after they are encountered, having tests makes pretty much the difference between "science" and "hypothesis"

The fact that the cross product of several generations of interpreter, several platforms, and tens of thousands of distributions is generated automatically by a handful of volunteers is a strong argument for CPAN/Perl being unique amongst the dynamic languages in it's testing and compatibility.

Additionally, people who aren't in the right circles probably never know how much grepping through CPAN happens when new features and syntax is suggested for the core Perl5 language. All done by the porters to be sure that new syntax won't break existing code without some fore-knowledge. This is on top of the automated testing.

CPAN is the only reason that I've kept my Camel book around since 2000, hoping that "someday" I'll learn Perl.

Oh, and "It has MOAR!" isn't really a good argument. I've authored two gems, I think. Those are the only two times in two years of using Ruby that I haven't had the ability to just install the library that I needed.

(I loved Perl for years until I found Ruby, then never turned back...)