I suspect most people learn Perl without using modules at first. Certainly my Baby Perl was very C like (even though I was never a very good C programmer), and I always "wrote my own." For instance, I wrote a BLAST paser the the people over at BioPerl wrote better, and I've written several html parsers that mostly worked. For me, it took a while of writing Perl to realize that not only that CPAN existed, but that it could really, really help me. And it was even longer before I realized the Perl Monks existed, and I expect it is that way for the majority of Perl coders.

Granted, we do get a few complete newbies here asking questions that could be and usually are answered with GCC (that's Go Check CPAN). Are we doing them a disservice? I suppose that is a possibility, but all it really means is that they will learn Perl differently from how I did. I never used strict before I came here, so the complete newbie will use CPAN modules but also use strict, so it is a trade off. The fact is, eventually the newbie will have to do something that is not found at CPAN and will have to write something from scratch, and be enlightend.

Scott