If you talk to Jarkko about the CPAN, he'll likely tell you that it's primarily a distribution service. It's a series of regularly updated mirrors containing some metadata and an archive of redistributable code. Many proposals for enhancements and replacements and reinventions in other languages have come and gone. Most of them have tried to add complexity to this simple base.

"I have always been unhappy reading source code on the Internet and on slides. The colors are never quite right. It seems like every Perl to HTML converter in existence gets it wrong (my blog is no exception).