1. Here's a direct paste of me running cpan install Parse::Lex, :\ not a very great experience

quote: 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?

NPM is a package manager that comes with NodeJS installations. I mention it because I want to understand why Perl, a language with much older and experienced scripting community has so much harder to use package manager than NodeJS.

quote: Perl data structures match more closely to JSON structures than any other language.

I have to sidetrack a bit here, Perl modules are largely package based(a weird version of hash tables that are less intuitive to use yet somehow benchmark faster than hash tables). NodeJS modules are just hash tables with a bunch of memory leaks in them.