A comment about the story at [link|http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/12/1616209|http://use.perl.org/...=02/11/12/1616209] in particular.

I forget who said it, or where, but a summary I saw said:
A large part of the reason why Perl has CPAN and other languages do not is that a lot of sysadmins use Perl. Therefore some are willing to cobble together systems to support Perl, and others are willing to donate resources to make those systems work. It is quick, it is dirty, but it is there, works, and grows.


Cheers,
Ben