it goes beyond CPAN - it would have been nice to have a "batteries-included" version that packs in most useful libraries (like Python's Image, lxml, etc libraries).
The very argument that choice > standardization is something I dont get - even in Rails, you have the choice of not using the default templating engine, JavaScript framework, etc. But it doesnt mean that they dont package it in anyway. This accelerates adoption, since it gets out of your way - and later when you mature as a developer, you can of course customize it wildly.
It may or may not also have the happy side-effect that the quality of the packaged libraries increase, because of a much larger user-base. I'd much rather that people fork mature libraries than hack the one-millionth version of an XML library that just does 2 things.
The very argument that choice > standardization is something I dont get - even in Rails, you have the choice of not using the default templating engine, JavaScript framework, etc. But it doesnt mean that they dont package it in anyway. This accelerates adoption, since it gets out of your way - and later when you mature as a developer, you can of course customize it wildly.
It may or may not also have the happy side-effect that the quality of the packaged libraries increase, because of a much larger user-base. I'd much rather that people fork mature libraries than hack the one-millionth version of an XML library that just does 2 things.