CPAN still works fine.  Some of it is due to Perl not changing fundamentally in a long time so some old package from 2005 is still likely to work today.  Most breakage I&#x27;ve found comes from external dependencies, packages that load data from websites tends to decay very quickly if not maintained for example.<p>That said, it is still good practice to try to avoid dependencies on packages that are not maintained, or you might find yourself the de-facto maintainer of the package.  This is true across all languages.<p>Perhaps one of the most enduring legacies of Perl is that no language that comes after it can be considered complete until it has its own CPAN like package management system.  That and the regular expression engine of course.