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It's often heard that CPAN is Perl's Killer App. No argument from me!

I believe what's even more impressive in the Perl ecosystem is CPAN testers.

When you upload a module to CPAN, lots of neat things happen. Of particular interest is all of the testing that gets done. For example:

http://www.cpantesters.org/distro/M/Message-Inform.html

As you can see, that's a pretty wide swath of OS and Perl versions.

This is an example of a failure report: http://www.cpantesters.org/cpan/report/e93a7034-cf3f-11e5-96...

This is an powerful resource. I've had random people approach me with suggested fixes to test failures on CPAN in the past. It's amazing!

I believe the Perl community is serious about testing and reliability in ways that few others are. For example, the default module installation command ($ cpan <module name> or $ cpanm <module name>) will NOT install if there are failures in any of the tests.

By modern standards, Perl5 has some silly characteristics, no doubt. But as others have said, the community is rock solid, and more lively than ever:

https://metacpan.org/recent

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