| I'm an author on CPAN who pushes one or two releases a month[1]. I'm actually surprised the number of uploads is still as high as it is, and a few thoughts struck me about the graph: 1) Most long time libraries have pretty much reached stability and the (still relatively high) backwards compatibility promise of perl5 means they don't have to be updated to support changes in the language, which still has releases every year. 2) The quality of uploads to CPAN is of the form of solving more complex problems or interfacing with core Unix/network/internet/lower level lib stuff stuff - you don't see so much of the leftpad type modules on CPAN. 3) It definitely feels like the number of authors has shrunk significantly, even though the graph suggests that has stayed relatively level. I suspect there's a long tail of active authors and most signups never actually upload anything 4) The biggest problem now is finding modules for newer APIs - I wrote some, including for more well known services such as GoCardless and Monzo 5) Holy crap, the graph covers almost 24 years of uploads. You will probably see the same pattern in Python, JS, Go, and so on if you come back in an equivalent number of years - the most common problems get solved first, and libraries uploaded for those. 6) The graph covers uploads to CPAN, I'd guess a far more important one would be downloads from CPAN as that will probably give you more information about the relative level of use of the language. [1] https://metacpan.org/author/LEEJO |