[doxcf434]

I think the difference is in other languages I don't have to think about these things any more than I think about what IRQ my sound card is on.

In the CPAN case, if cpanminus is the "good one", then it should be installed by default and CPAN.pm needs to tell you to use that instead or just be deprecated. I don't want 5 choices in package managers, I just want the good one. :)

[eCa]

One factor that sometimes leads to problems in this regard is (as mentioned) backwards compatibility. Pretty much nothing that once has worked can be removed or changed because somewhere mission-critical software depends on it.

Another issue is discoverability. A concrete example is that https://metacpan.org/ is a much better (imho) presentation of cpan than http://search.cpan.org/.

It is the curse of being a very stable language and ecosystem.