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... what does the much-vaunted CPAN contain within it that has unit tests?

Any serious distribution on the CPAN has at least a decent test suite in its t/ directory. Everything uploaded to the CPAN gets run through the CPAN Testers service, often within minutes of the upload.

search.cpan.org has over 3200 results for module names which contain the word "Test".

I can think of over 106,000 reasons to use Perl (and by the way, CPAN is still seeing very large numbers of both contributions and contributors).
     

CPAN Testers reports over 21000 http://stats.cpantesters.org/ I think the number on cpan.org might older... and updated less often. Guess ruby has a ways to go yet.

Looks like cpan removed their robots.txt file at least from where I am sitting.

The file in question is robots.txt for cpantesters.org, which does exist.

I remember reading that the MSNBOT reads the "Robots.txt" file, but cpantesters has a lowercase filename:

http://static.cpantesters.org/robots.txt

http://static.cpantesters.org/Robots.txt doesn't exist, so basically MSNBOT only respects the robots.txt on case insensitive operating systems.

I remember reading that the MSNBOT reads the "Robots.txt" file, but cpantesters has a lowercase filename:

http://static.cpantesters.org/robots.txt

http://static.cpantesters.org/Robots.txt doesn't exist, so basically MSNBOT only respects the robots.txt on case insensitive operating systems.

Perl probably has the best testing culture out there from the major programming languages, including Java on the list. Between TAP, Perl 5 core's large test suite and a myriad of test related modules it has automated testing well covered.

Did you know for example that when you upload something to CPAN, it gets automatically smoked on dozens of platforms and hundreds of different boxes, test reports sent to the author and assistance provided to diagnose platform specific problems if needed?

Manual testing is for the problems not caught by the huge array of automated tests.