Failed in the sense that they've failed to recapture the glory of cpan for solving problems from the late 80s and early 90s. Personally I've been very pleased with library support in Python.
Counting a library's worth by the number of things in it is probably not a good measure of its worth. But it'll be who knows how long before pypi or gems overtake cpan in terms of sheer quantity.
A better measure of worth would be a deathmatch showdown between seasoned perl people and seasoned ruby/python/whatever developers, where each can bring the powers of his libraries to bear.
But anyone who has had much exposure to perl people will tell you: never, ever underestimate them. They'll come at you with solutions to problems out of left field that solve the problem in 34 characters of self morphing regular expressions or something while everybody else is turning in comparatively huge 8 line readable programs.
Or they come up with a 5 line solution, using a CPAN module that has had it's battery of unit tests automatically run through on 200+ different os/hardware/perl combinations, which also comes with its own little test suite and works out of the box; while everyone else runs their stuff and discovers they still need to catch a dozen weird edge cases.
Until other languages reach this kind of solidity and thoroughness in testing CPAN will stay at the top of the bunch.
Counting a library's worth by the number of things in it is probably not a good measure of its worth. But it'll be who knows how long before pypi or gems overtake cpan in terms of sheer quantity.
A better measure of worth would be a deathmatch showdown between seasoned perl people and seasoned ruby/python/whatever developers, where each can bring the powers of his libraries to bear.
But anyone who has had much exposure to perl people will tell you: never, ever underestimate them. They'll come at you with solutions to problems out of left field that solve the problem in 34 characters of self morphing regular expressions or something while everybody else is turning in comparatively huge 8 line readable programs.