Hmmm - before writing a lick of perl, I considered myself a very experienced C/C++ programmer, and a beginner Java programmer. (Of course, you'll have to take my word on those.) Now I consider myself an experienced perl programmer (although you can form your own opinion on that from my track record). I do believe that my background in C, C++, and, especially shell scripting, all contributed very highly to learning perl quickly and becoming useful in it.

I do believe that I am one of the more effective perl programmers in our entire work group, and that I got that way partly from my C/C++ experience. That is, I learned to program, and then I learned some languages afterwards.

I suppose the key to me is someone who likes to learn idiomatically. Who likes to write C in C, Java in Java, C++ in C++, shell in shell, Fortran absolutely nowhere, and will then likely want to write Perl in Perl. I suppose the tough part of this is figuring out that the candidate is such a person - asking this question point blank is useless as most people will understand what the desired answer is and give it, even if they don't really understand the question. Figuring out a behavioural question for this is going to be interesting.

Code samples are good things, as are "How would you solve this?" type questions. Remember - the first answer should always be "Check CPAN". If it's not, pass.

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My criteria for good software:

1. Does it work?
2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

It would take longer for an experienced Java/C/C++ programmer to become an excellent Perl programmer than it would a college intern.

I disagree.

It's certainly not been true in my experiences of teaching newbie and experienced developers Perl. There's a hell of a lot of programming knowledge that's not related to the static/dynamic divide.

A Perl expert has a mindset that a static language developer simply cannot understand. Now, if you had said Lisp or Python or Ruby programer ...

There's a rather big assumption here that experienced static Java/C/C++ programmers are a completely different group from experienced Lisp/Python/Ruby programmers :-)