CPAN is an awesome tool. First, this is a good way to avoid to reinvent the wheel. Second, it's companion, CpanTesters community platform, gives to the authors a damn simple way to test their modules on a huge variety of OS and architectures. These tests are public and will help people to choose distributions according to their needs and quality exigences. Third, it encourage to test and upload modules at early stages of the development: it makes possible to simplify the development process by retrieving test results, and be sure the modules will be usable on various OS, even if they are quite old or uncommon. It's almost disappointing sometimes how for any task you need to achieve, each time there is an existing module ready to be <i>use</i>.