"To date, I fear using CPAN because of past experience having to go through tens of minutes of questions in command line"

Citations please, specific distribution names required. This is not my near 20 year experience. A minute fraction maybe, but that's for your own good.

"1. Why isn't there an NPM for Perl?"

As someone who dabbles in JS/JQuery very, very infrequently, can you elaborate on what NPM is for so that those in this neighbourhood who may be ignorant (like me) can get a better picture?

"2. Why is JSON so popular if Perl already had the same concepts long before JS existed."

JSON, although related to JS by name, is simply a standard data storage format. XML has come into presence as well, but it (imho) sucks. It's just another storage mechanism that works cross-platform. It has nothing to do with Perl at all. In fact, Perl data structures match more closely to JSON structures than any other language. That said, I have given examples of using JSON to transfer serial data between Perl, Python, C, C++, C# ad-infinitum. Perl has core (and external) storage formats, but the ones you may be thinking of are not easily across platforms. Either way, JSON is just as popular as something like SQLite for example... it's just a way to store, transact upon and use data across platforms and languages.

"3. Why is there so few Perl versions for windows..."

berrybrew.

-stevieb