[vivin]

I guess my experience with CPAN has been different. Probably the most frustrating thing is the paucity of documentation from certain perl modules. But the modules I've found and used have been pretty good quality and pretty stable.

Then again, I've never built anything "enterprisey" in Perl (just little tools and scripts here and there), so that could it be it.

[cyberpanther]

I think you might have hit something here. Because Perl is definitely hard to read and with bare documentation, the module might have been fine but we just never knew how to use it.

[felixgallo]

Perl can be hard to read, but it has incredible documentation and CPAN set (and apparently still keeps) the diamond standard for language packages and distribution systems.