Perl is pretty big language and build of not very orthogonal parts. I've read somewhere an interview with Larry Wall where he said he was not planning to make

Perl is pretty big language and build of not very orthogonal parts. I've read somewhere an interview with Larry Wall where he said he was not planning to make the language very clean and orthogonal from the start - but instead he wanted to watch the way people use the language and then cut off the unused parts (the actual analogy was with building pavements along the paths that people made in the grass instead of planning up front how they are going to commute). I think that cut off phase never came. After some 10 years of programming in Perl, there are still areas that I don't know really well - I just don't use them, and when reading other peoples code I still sometimes need to lookup something. I can see why this can be annoying. But eventually the size of the libraries that you need to memorize when programming is still much bigger than the language itself, so it does not matter that much. My prediction is that other languages will not build their CPAN equivalents soon. It looks so easy to copy, especially if you believe you have a better language, but what people don't see is the complex network of things that enable CPAN existence. It's not just code repository it is a complex ecosystem.