The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.

What about writing it first and rationalizing it afterwards?

There's many scripting languages in the world, Perl is a little bit special because it is based more on some ideas from the way natural languages work.

I'm definitely a night owl. I get going about the time my wife crashes and goes to bed. And in some sense, I've had to learn to be more of a cat napper in recent years because Perl development, Perl design and development, has become a worldwide phenomenon - not just mailing lists, but RSC channels, Twitter even. This all happens 24 hours a day. And people come up with questions at any time of the day or night.

Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.

Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.