Well, that's usually because there's a certain vocal member of the Perl community who kept yelling about how "inefficient" the IO::Socket library was, and so anyone that wants to talk to a socket tends to handwrite the first 10% of object-oriented library and live with their own code.

Actually, that's amusing, since Graham Barr wrote both IO::Socket and Net::FTP. The fact that he didn't use his own module should tell you something.

Ease of use does not translate to performance, necessarily.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker