[jbjohns]

You didn't read my comment. The point is that in a big org I don't have CPAN. Not without a big fight. And the perl language comes with do-it-yourself OO (they're not packaging Moose with the distro now are they?) and a bunch of other problems that you have to have CPAN to fix.

[jrockway]

I work at a company with 300,000 employees, and I had no trouble getting CPAN.

Perhaps it's just your company that's dysfunctional, not all big companies.

[jbjohns]

This would be a problem at every big company I've worked for that didn't already have something. Obviously it isn't a problem everywhere but knowing what I do about big companies I would say it's more likely than not.

And I wouldn't call it dysfunctional to not make it easy for people to be downloading all kinds of software for production systems.

[jrockway]

And I wouldn't call it dysfunctional to not make it easy for people to be downloading all kinds of software for production systems.

If only we felt the same way about letting people write their own software for production systems...

[chollida1]

I thought I did read your comment. However even if you can't access CPAN this doesn't change anything.

I find the default install of Perl to have just as many libraries built in as Python does. So even if you can't access CPAN then neither Perl or Python has a library advantage out of the box.

[berntb]

I think you are arguing angels and needle heads. :-)

The best part with Perl is the CPAN. If you know what you do, for quite a few areas you are crazily productive. It makes good economic sense.

My point is -- the size of the default install is irrelevant, the win is when you install stuff from CPAN. It is arguably better if the default install is thin, because then people/organizations will have routines to install stuff from CPAN...

(Other good points with Perl is that the language is fun and that the social culture of nerds is wonderful. The main negative ones for Perl are the trolling ("PERL is dead") and the learning curve.)