I'd give up Perl tomorrow if only...

[David Mitchell]

.. there was something equivalent in scope and breadth to CPAN.

More and more I find myself in positions where I can use pretty well
whatever language I like, and I'm increasingly drawn to Python.  It's
elegant, it's easy to support, development time is really fast, ... (you
guys know the rest!)

However, I'm probably equally proficient in Perl, and Perl has this
incredible resource in CPAN.  For just about any library module I've ever
wanted, I can download one or more modules from CPAN that gets me 90% of the way
there.  Perl modules like DBI/DBD, SOAP::Lite, GD::Graph, MQSeries::*,
Tie::*, Convert::EBCDIC, and so on (and on) make me exceptionally
productive in the eyes of the people I work for, and tend to just destroy
any reservations about using Perl in those organizations.

Don't get me wrong: Python also has some outstanding modules that are
reliable, powerful and make life much easier as well.  I also enjoy using
Python much more than Perl these days, for most of the well-documented
reasons.  There just isn't any Python resource with the breadth
of coverage of what's at CPAN.

If there was only some way to subclass Perl/CPAN modules as Python
modules (i.e. similar to how you can subclass Java modules and use them
from Jython), I'd jump on it in a heartbeat.  For the vast majority of what I
do, performance isn't that big a deal, so I'd be happy to live with some
cross-language delay.  I've been hoping something along these lines might
arise out of the Parrot initiative, but so far it hasn't.

Is ANYONE working on this, or thinking about working on it, or knows
someone who's thinking about working on it, or dreaming about it, or ...?

Regards

David Mitchell