[damagednoob]

> And they reinvented the wheel.

Buried amongst the comments was this from one of the creators:

> On the live environment we were told at the time we had Perl 5.6, and a few BBC approved perl modules. Nothing more! So that meant that catalyst a other solutions were out.

I guess this could have been a defensive security policy. I think CPAN has had relatively few supply chain attacks like npm, pypi, et al. But that's probably due to it's popularity.