I'm not a perl guy, but have found cpan to actually feel like a library - you get differences in quality and no standard approach to anything but it's a vast re

I'm not a perl guy, but have found cpan to actually feel like a library - you get differences in quality and no standard approach to anything but it's a vast resource. I am a Perl guy, and you are not far from the truth. CPAN has a staggering number of modules, many of which are battle-hardened, brilliant pieces of code, many more of which are multiple v0.01 half-assings of the same purpose, and some of which are just toys. The there's-more-than-one-way-to-do-it (TIMTOWTDI) philosophy of the Perl community practicallly ensures that CPAN will be this way. Rarely is there a "canonical" way to do anything. There isn't and never will be a list of CPAN modules indexed by quality. I have been writing Perl professionally for about ten years now. I love and appreciate CPAN as a resource, and there is nothing like it in other languages. But for common constructs, I also appreciate having a single, well-written module as part of the language core, rather than fishing through six or seven e.g. DateTime implementations and trying to decide which one suits me best. I do Ruby work as well, and I am quite pleased with the Ruby core libs in this way. (The OO-all-the-way-down design of Ruby helps too.)