I think if I took that attitude when I started at my current job I wouldn't have wound up being asked to train most of the other programmers how to use Perl.

I wholeheartedly agree that any good Perl programmer should know the precedence rules. That does not mean that their code should be written using them all if you have any expectation that it will someday have to be altered by someone not as conversant as you.

But this is a disagreement we won't settle any time soon. One of my sillier mistakes was to have this argument with Tom C. You know that I deliberately limit myself to a set of constructs that I think I can teach to others. The one I was responding to is simply not common enough for me to want it on a short-list of things I have to teach. OTOH another time I showed a construct I had to deal with (that was written by someone else) to p5p and got general shock and horror about how convoluted it was. Plus one of my favorite quotes ever on programming from Tom C:

A programmer who hasn't been exposed to all four of the imperative, functional, objective, and logical programming styles has one or more conceptual blindspots. It's like knowing how to boil but not fry. Programming is not a skill one develops in five easy lessons.

I think that when there are valid and valuable constructs that can cause that much reaction on a list with as many tuits as p5p, it is beyond the bounds of reason to expect most companies to have people who could maintain a code-base that uses all of them.

For bystanders, the construct handed to me is this:

print join ",", map { &{$field_info{$_}{format}}($deal) } @fields;
[download]

I pointed out that I had cleaned it up. Thanks to merlyn it got cleaned up a bit more, and this construct shows up from time to time in my code like this:

my @field_subs = map {$field_info{$_}{format}} @fields;
# TIME PASSES
print join ",", map {$_->($deal)} @field_subs;
[download]

In fact a variation of it appeared in my first post here, at A few style suggestions.

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