Just doing a split like this will lead to insanity at some point, unless you can completely insure your data NEVER has commas, or has COMPLETELY PREDICTABLE commas in it. The modules help cope with encapsulated data (When dumping to CSV, Excel will often encapsulate data with a comma in double quotes) and other potential stupidity so you don't $self->shoot('foot'). They aren't perfect, but they're a vast improvement over blindly splitting on an arbitrary delimiter for real world data.