Influence
Experienced Perl programmers often comment that half of Perl's power is in the CPAN. It has been called Perl's killer app. Though the TeX typesetting language has an equivalent, the CTAN (and in fact the CPAN's name is based on the CTAN), few languages have an exhaustive central repository for libraries. The PHP language has PECL and PEAR, Python has a PyPI (Python Package Index) repository, Ruby has RubyGems, Lua has LuaRocks, Haskell has Hackage and an associated installer/make clone cabal; but none of these are as large as the CPAN. Recently, Common Lisp has a de facto CPAN-like system—the Quicklisp repositories. Other major languages, such as Java and C++, have nothing similar to the CPAN (though for Java there is central Maven, and C++ has the Boost C++ Libraries).
The CPAN has grown so large and comprehensive over the years that many people learning Perl seem to elevate it to a sort of mythical status, and express surprise when they begin to encounter topics for which a CPAN module doesn't exist already.
The CPAN's influence on Perl's eclectic culture should not be underestimated either. As a hive of activity in the Perl world, the CPAN both shapes and is shaped by Perl culture. Its "self-appointed master librarian", Jarkko Hietaniemi, often takes part in the April Fools Day jokes so popular on the Internet; on 1 April 2002 the site was temporarily named to CJAN, where the "J" stood for "Java". In 2003, the www.cpan.org domain name was redirected to Matt's Script Archive, a site infamous in the Perl community for having badly written code.
Beyond April Fools', however, some of the distributions on the CPAN are jokes in themselves. The Acme:: hierarchy is reserved for joke modules; for instance, Acme::Don't adds a don't function that doesn't run the code given to it (to complement the do built-in, which does). Even outside the Acme:: hierarchy, some modules are still written largely for amusement; one example is Lingua::Romana::Perligata, which can be used to write Perl programs in a subset of Latin.
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