What's so great about CPAN anyway?

cheeseship?! Better edit that one quick before the Pythonistas get you.

I'd like to point out that CTAN was the original. The idea and the CPAN name was derived from it. This was before the web went public, for you young folk.

Interestingly, CTAN originally (still do?) used a Perl script to mirror the FTP archive. It may be this that sparked the development of CPAN. In retrospect it was inevitable that CPAN would evolve far beyond the original - Perl is just made to build something like CPAN and the TeX community is focussed on document building tools.