Wise words indeed. I've often wondered about the need to elevate certain individuals in a community to god-like status. This, of course, transcends Perl (and programming languages, and software, and so on) but still, more often than not, seems detrimental. I don't think it really provides an incentive to most programmers, but then again I never paid attention in psychology ;)

Also, as you touched on, near-fanatical devotions to certain paradigms doesn't help much either. Any code that doesn't conform to these specifications is instantly looked down upon. It's also the first thing that's looked for as a problem in posted code, often causing the reviewer to ignore actual errors and give advice like "add use strict, then repost" which doesn't really help anything.

So basically "me too" to the parent post :)