Short answer - no.

CPAN has had many more years than Ruby's Gems to mature and develop.

There are 2560 [edit: I was wrong. 39411 is the right number] gems on http://rubygems.org/. There are 24,920 distributions on CPAN. Well over 100k modules. The automated testing infrastructure, documentation, etc. also makes it much easier to figure out what modules work on what systems and what versions of perl than in ruby land. Things like meta.cpan.org and cpantesters.org are a god send that I wish I had when I'm using other languages.

And the testing infrastructure rocks.

It's evolved so everything produces and consumes TAP (http://testanything.org/) a simple human-readable protocol for expressing pass/fail results (with standard modules that help people output and consume TAP).

This means I can write tests procedurally, or in an xUnit style, or a BDD style, or a specification-based testing style, or use various DSLs for things like exception testing or for testing web apps... and so on.

I just use the style that seems most appropriate for the thing being tested. They all output TAP. All the standard test runners consume TAP. Everything "just works" and plays nice together.

I can even easily integrate tests running in other languages or environments as long as they output TAP.

In addition - since almost all of the Perl testing modules use a common TAP output module - you can usually integrate different styles in the same test code. So, if appropriate, I can pop some specification-based tests and some friendly web-testing DSL as assertions inside my xUnit tests.

Fun :-)

Wish other languages test environments were setup this way.

The thing that is really awesome about the testing environment is that is makes it immediately obvious when a module on cpan has been abandoned.

That makes it easy to use a cpan module with confidence, which imo is not valued highly enough in other language communities cpan-like structures.

According to rubygems.org stats page[1], there are 39411 gems available. I think the number 2560 on "all gems" page[2] is the number of gems starting with letter "a".

1. http://rubygems.org/stats

2. http://rubygems.org/gems?letter=A

You're quite correct. My apologies.

I misunderstood the 39411 number to be the total number of gems submitted over all time, rather than the total number of extant versions. My bad.

Don't worry, it happens all the time [1].

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3238544

Ironically, this is the same issue of sloppy testing, just at another level (i.e. missing usability tests on the http://rubygems.org/gems website for at least months, maybe years)

wrt testing, ruby is getting there with http://travis-ci.org

Also the rspec ecosystem is becoming more and more mix-and-match.

It's nowhere near as integrated as perl yet though.

Travis-CI also works for a bunch of other languages, so if you're a library maintainer, it's definitely worth checking out:

http://about.travis-ci.org/docs/user/getting-started/

It will be amazing when it supports any repo path. Now it's just a github utility.

Check this site out for a comparison of the various module counts per language. It is really incredible that rubygems surpassed CPAN last year and continues to grow at a very rapid rate. Quality may be another matter, but still, impressive.

http://www.modulecounts.com/

Except that there's over 107,000 Perl modules on CPAN, and fewer than 40,000 Ruby gems.

That's not comparing like with like. Gems are the equivalent of CPAN distributions.

Nice site. Well found.

I find it interesting that PHP doesn't have anything in the same league as Perl/Ruby/Python even after all these years.

Any PHP folk out there?

The closest PHP has to CPAN is PEAR (http://pear.php.net). It stalled for a long time, although development seems to have picked up a bit now that everything is on GitHub (https://github.com/pear/)

Composer (with http://packagist.org/) is getting popular in the PHP world.

They're missing a few languages. For instance, Quicklisp.[1]

[1] http://www.quicklisp.org/beta/