Editing CPAN (section)

==Influence==
Experienced Perl programmers often comment that half of Perl's power is in the CPAN. It has been called Perl's [[killer app]].<ref name="PERLmonks">{{cite web |title=Re: Killer Apps in PERL|url=http://www.perlmonks.org/bare/?node_id=187498 |access-date=24 February 2013}}</ref> It is roughly equivalent to [[Composer (software)|Composer]] for [[PHP]]; the [[PyPI]] (Python Package Index) repository for [[Python (programming language)|Python]]; [[RubyGems]] for [[Ruby (programming language)|Ruby]]; [[CRAN (R programming language)|CRAN]] for [[R (programming language)|R]]; [[npm (software)|npm]] for [[Node.js]]; [[LuaRocks]] for [[Lua]]; [[Apache Maven|Maven]] for [[Java (programming language)|Java]]; and [[Hackage]] for [[Haskell]]. CPAN's use of arbitrated name spaces, a testing regime and a well defined documentation style makes it unique.

Given its importance to the Perl developer community, the CPAN both shapes and is shaped by [[Perl#Perl community|Perl's culture]]. Its "self-appointed master librarian", [[Jarkko Hietaniemi]], often takes part in the [[April Fools' Day]] jokes; on 1 April 2002 the site was temporarily named to ''[[CJAN]]'', where the "J" stood for "Java". In 2003, the <code>www.cpan.org</code> domain name was redirected to [[Matt's Script Archive]], a site infamous in the Perl community for having badly written code.<ref>{{cite web
|title=Elements of Programming with Perl
|url=http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=36308
|date=12 October 2000
|access-date=25 April 2013}}</ref><ref>{{cite web
|title=Exploit this formmail.pl for fun and, well, fun
|url=http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=102758
|date=7 August 2001
|access-date=25 April 2013}}</ref><ref>{{cite web
|title=Matt's Script Archive Strikes Again!
|url=http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=93731
|date=4 July 2001
|access-date=25 April 2013}}</ref>

Some of the distributions on the CPAN are distributed as jokes. The <code>[[Acme Corporation|Acme]]::</code> hierarchy is reserved for joke modules; for instance, <code>Acme::Don't</code> adds a <code>don't</code> function that doesn't run the code given to it (to complement the <code>do</code> built-in, which does). Even outside the <code>Acme::</code> hierarchy, some modules are still written largely for amusement; one example is <code>Lingua::Romana::Perligata</code>, which can be used to write Perl programs in a subset of Latin.

In 2005, a group of Perl developers who also had an interest in [[JavaScript]] got together to create [[JSAN]], the JavaScript Archive Network. The JSAN is a near-direct port of the CPAN infrastructure for use with the JavaScript language, which for most of its lifespan did not have a cohesive "community".

In 2008, after a chance meeting with CPAN admin [[Adam Kennedy (programmer)|Adam Kennedy]] at the Open Source Developers Conference, Linux kernel developer [[Rusty Russell]] created the CCAN, the Comprehensive C Archive Network. The CCAN is a direct port of the CPAN architecture for use with the [[C (programming language)|C language]].

CRAN, the Comprehensive R Archive Network, is a set of mirrors hosting the [[R (programming language)|R language]] distribution(s), documentation, and contributed extensions.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#What-is-CRAN_003f |title=What is CRAN? |access-date=20 December 2019}}</ref>