Ovid's solution: Use more CPAN. He says "Most of the tools you need to build most common applications have already been written and are waiting for you on the CPAN."

There are a couple of problems with this solution, IMO. Some of the modules in CPAN aren't that great (some, like, Text::Netstr are just horribly broken) and there's no obvious way to seperate the good from the bad, or even say "please don't use this it's broken".

Also perl tends to make hacks really easy, couple that with the fact that adding dependencies is generally painful and it's often easier to ignore/not-think-about the corner cases and just paste some simple code in.

One solution might be to make installing from CPAN much easier (for a packaged distro, say), but people have been saying that for a long time ... and perl-DateManip is in basically every distro. and I still see code avoiding it.