Tim Bunce debunks Perl myths

Reposted from PerlMonks: The numbers showing CPAN expotential growth should not be treated as Perl specialty - it is Open Source as a whole that has this property http://www.riehle.org/publications/2008/the-total-growth-of-open-source/. But still no other language has so much infrastructure built for making the openly available code useful. CPAN was the second (after CTAN) of a kind repository and it is the first one to reach such a massive scale forcing us to find ways to keep it useful under this expotential growth. And this is something that will not be easily copied by other languages - because it is an ecosystem - a complex conglomerate of software tools, social practices and supporting organisations. The testing culture with supporting modules, dependency scanning , Perl::Critic, mailing lists, IRC chatrooms, TPF and our own site are all elements of it. This is where the language maturity really shows off. And there are new experiements mashrooming all the time - like Annotated CPAN documentation and CPAN::Forum (which is, by the way, waiting for some Google Summer of Code applicants to write a mailing list gateway and other improvements). And in the face of expotential growth of all Open Source software Perl is once again in the avant garde treading the new ways of maintaining a massive ecosystem of interdependend code libraries.