Nice one... ++

I suppose, that we are not short of ideas but short of time, and that's the main problem. Of course idea of learning the way you pointed is very good.
Learning Perl is one thing. Another benefit should be ability to work in (large?) group of programmers, maybe some XP (eXtreme Programming - yup 'XP' is used way to common).
For some time i'm working on ISO 9000 quality certificates, and also have some ideas, rather to discuss than to code, but... give me some time :-) and i'm sure it would also be interesting fot many of Monks here...

Greetz, Tom.