We all have only so many hours of life available to us. We must use some of those to learn the skills that allow us to make a living so we can use the remaining hours to do other things. Those learing hours are an investment in the quality of the other hours. The more we invest in learning a skill, the more we have a personal interest in ensuring that skill is well seen and in-demand.

How many man-hours would you estimate you have invested in learning Perl?

• Zero - I'm just a bot passing through.
• Just a few - I'm new to this, and now totally freaked out by the number of hours implied in the answers below.
• Hundreds - So what can I do to help make Perl an in-demand language so I get the maximum return on my investment?
• None - I refuse to acknowledge the term man hours, you patriarchical pig. But I have many person-hours. And let me tell you.....
• More time than I've spent learning basic social skills.
• What "other things"? All my time goes to learning Perl. It's become an obsession.
• The beauty of Perl is that while the well of capabilities is deep, the basic framework is so intuitive that you can become pretty darn productive very quickly, so while my total hours invested is low, I want to point out that my ability to produce in Perl is much greater than you might expect by that number.
• Thanks to Scalosian water, I learned everything there is to know about Perl in a blink of your un-accelerated eye.