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That's a good question. I think it's not a coincidence that CPAN predated the widespread use of distributed source control systems whereas pypi and gems blew up just as mercurial and git were unseating svn and cvs. It's a different release philosophy (remember, in the 1990s you often didn't even get to see pre-release CVS commits of open source projects; that was an innovation of OpenBSD).

I also think the widespread use of VPSs rather than accounts on shared servers (again, containerization) was a factor. In the 90s and early 2000s, you usually (even in a corporate setting) had an unprivileged account on a server with a given version of apache and perl, your own cgi-bin directory, and possibly some latitude on a personal CPAN install directory. The lack of containerization meant you had to compromise between using newer software and breaking existing use cases.

So I guess I think it's not so much about Python vs. Perl per se but about the technologies available when those languages became popular among developers.



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