I keep looking into the language wars and I believe perl is a crappy language for many reasons and anytime anyone says that all the perl fanboys reply is "CPAN", is it really THAT impressive?
Yes.<p>CPAN contains modules for "everything", which is an enormous time-saver. CPAN also hooks in with automated test-suites, and build-reports for different environments so while the quality of various modules may be variable it is usually obvious very quickly if you're looking at a "supported" module or not. (A poor author will ignore the facilities available to them.)<p>I enjoy perl, and tend to believe most languages are "crappy". But it is the users who make that a real thing - good code is good code, bad code is bad code, and while a language obviously influences users they tend to be "OK" by default.