Not everyone is 19 and has the time or inclination to immerse themselves in hacking for six months to a year. Those of us who do, emerge somewhere between, say, myself and Alan Cox. (To be unsubtle, he's a lot better than I am.)

Not everyone who reads "The Hobbit" goes on to "The Simarillion" or puts runes on his home node. Not everyone who earns money off of the Internet has a broadband connection. Not everyone who drives changes his own oil.programmer in general, in that I can also work in C or Java or shell or Ruby or whatever circumstances dictate.

If you like it and enjoy playing with it, that's very good. There are dozens of other people here and on p5p and #perl and use Perl; who feel the same way.

I'm a Perl programmer, sure. I'd like to think I'm a programmer in general. I can also work in C or Java, shell, Ruby, or whatever circumstances dictate. As with most all hobbies, we're in a distinct minority when you look across the globe.

It's not that we don't use Perl for work, it's that we use it outside of work as well. There's the difference.

Update: ChemBoy pointed out intermingled paragraphs near the end. It's fixed now.