I started playing with PERL over 13 years ago; I saw it as a wonderful language that made easy things easy, and hard things possible.

To date, I fear using CPAN because of past experience having to go through tens of minutes of questions in command line before I hopefully can get to entering command lines, at which point it tells me my MinGW ran out of memory, and I can't use it on this particular system.

So I fear that if I do use CPAN, if I choose to use it for a school project, or give it to a friend, they simply won't be able to or won't be willing to get the modules needed to use the scripts I write.

Then, roughly 3 years ago, I tried NPM and NodeJS and the first thing I thought was: this... is just Perl in different clothing:

Everything just worked, with very rare module not working being easy to ask for feedback on Github.

So I come here to ask a few questions.

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

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

How is {foo: 1, bar: {}, gaz: []} any different than {foo => 1, bar => {}, gaz => []}?

I understand lisp had similar concepts, but lisp didn't actually integrate dictionaries into their language to the same level as lists.

3. Why is there so few Perl versions for windows, while there are SO MANY JavaScript versions for Windows(every browser, JScript, nashorn for java, NodeJS)?