Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.

Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality.

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed.

As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer.

So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that approach. It's kind of like a, well, sometimes Perl has been called the Swiss army chainsaw of the internet, but it's more like a Swiss army machine shop. It really gives you a lot of tools, some of which are dangerous, but it lets you get your job done very quickly.

I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'.