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Strange that in a blog comparing package managers there's no mention of CPAN, which "currently has 120,446 Perl modules in 27,328 distributions, written by 10,567 authors" [0].

It's a lively community, sure. But "changing the face of open-source" is a stretch -- "quietly" even more so.

[0]: http://www.cpan.org/

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There is a huge difference in the barrier to entry. To contribute a module to cpan versus contributing a module to NPM.

You might consider the barrier a feature, but it is a wild difference.

Well, if your argument is that it's easier to contribute to NPM, then you should consider that Perl has been managing the same output for 18 years that the Node community has for the past four: about 6700 modules/year.

For what it's worth, uploading to CPAN is not very difficult. Getting a PAUSE account is easy and uploading is no problem. It's really no harder than the PyPI system.

Step #1 is "apply". That is a hell of a barrier to entry. You also need to explain what you want to do with the pause account.

As I said in another comment, it might end up being to the detriment of node, but now it feels like a feature.

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