Hey, thanks for this! Life actually slowed down enough, just for a little bit, and I made time to read Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years". His statement about staying interested enough to keep it fun is where I'm struggling most right now.

Perl is a great language, but it's difficult for me to find ways to enjoy it while overcoming the cognitive load of parsing sigils and braces and arrows (oh my!). I will press on because my team uses Perl and I will do the best job that I can. I use personal projects to learn more and keep it interesting, but it's work. Part of my learning plan's purpose is to help me feel like I'm making progress when it feels like I'm going nowhere.

Josh Kaufman wrote a book called "The First Twenty Hours". Really, you can learn the basics of a lot of things in a well crafted chunk of learning time and twenty hours is a great measure of 'I learned the very basics'. There's an entirely different measure when you start to dream and the problems are being solved in a language you love. When you can't wait to get up in the morning and work with your language. When you want to contribute back to what you love.

I'm not there with Perl. It's a great language, but it's still more like talking to my ex than spending time with the girl that smiles when I show up.