So, in the meantime, most developers in large corporate environments need non-module programming solutions and core module solutions but cannot use solutions which refer to a non-core CPAN module and for these purposes, core means "core in the late 1990's"!
Having been doing commercial perl work for nearly ten years now I can only think of two clients who did not use CPAN modules all over their code. They were, in my opinion, idiots and wasted time and resources reimplementing stuff that was there to download. And in one of those instances it was because they were "scared" of open source rather than due to any maintainability issues.
Three things make this a non-issue:
- Most of CPAN works quite happily on older perl's. I've recently been doing a bunch of work on a codebase that uses 5.6.0 for reasons to dull to go into. 99% of everything still "just works"
- In the cases where it doesn't work the source code is available. Most of the time it's easier to backport than it is to reimplement.
- Any professional organisation has roll out processes, test suites, etc. That make migrating code to newer versions a business issue, rather than a technical issue.
So pretty much a non-issue in my experience.
