Dwindling CPAN releases

This couple of months I’ve been casually looking at daily CPAN uploads, because I entered the Once-a-day-releases game. I notice that the uploads are getting scarcer and scarcer. So today I decided to take a look at monthly upload statistics. The result is summarized in the chart below which shows the number of monthly CPAN releases, unique distributions, and unique authors up to July 2019.

Indeed, the uploads have been diminishing recently, from 1215 in Apr, to 980 in May, 886 in Jun, and 944 in Jul. Not counting my own releases, it’s 1076 in Apr, 888 in May, 793 in Jun, and 753 in Jul. It’s sad to see that I affect the stats so significantly. I can’t be the only one still using Perl that much or actively in the whole wide world, am I?

One thing I want to point out is that, ironically, the tipping point is Aug 2014, when the first CPAN Day was organized. The number of releases peaked that month, but then have been steadily dwindling ever since.

Nowadays, CPAN gets 20-30 daily uploads on average; it was around 60-100 in 2014. Meanwhile Python’s PyPI page indicates that it gets at least 700-800 daily uploads. Interpret that as you wish, but Python is clearly eating everybody’s lunch. First it was Perl, then Ruby, then R.