Replying to you but for the OP's benefit. I think you're aware of everything I'm about to write.

This is really an important revelation, I think. A year or so before I started picking up Perl I became faster in a Unix environment than just about everyone at work. It wasn't aptitude as much as comfort (I wasn't scared to try new things), good typing skills, and laziness. Typing orderstat and specstat and friends six thousand times a day was for the birds. Alias o and s afforded one finger typing, and automatic mouse-selection-buffer copy plus one button pasting meant I was faster out of the gate than everyone else. alias pd "perldoc" has been in my .aliases since I learned it exists. I live by Ctrl^R on the command line.

In an age of instant documentation, being an adept librarian/researcher is equivalent to years of training. And having comfort with the tools means that once you find something, you can make it trivial to reuse. One that comes to mind–

alias hs "perldoc -m HTTP::Status | perl -ne '/\A\s+100/ .. /510/ and 
+print'"
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Agreed! Another one to add to the list: sometimes it's easiest to just test something. Not sure about precedence? perl -MO=Deparse,-p -e ... Not sure what context something is in? sub ctx { warn wantarray ? "list\n" : "scalar\n" } Something else? Whip up a quick script using one of the Test:: modules. Data::Dumper and friends debug 75 to 95% of my problems. And so on...

> I still don't always remember the order of arguments to substr or splice,

that's actually a good idea for extending snippets in my IDE (yasnippet/Emacs) ¹

> what I can do is type perldoc -f splice at lighting speed

actually I could also expand the embedded documentation to reflect this in my IDE

> at lighting speed...

unfortunately not at light speed, often you are redirected to other perldocs

like in

perldoc -f m

        m//     The match operator.  See perlop.
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¹) other suggestions for not memorable interfaces? caller ? what else ?

often you are redirected to other perldocs

That was kind of the point: Knowing when to look in perlre, perlop etc. helps!

> Knowing when to look in perlre, perlop etc. helps!

yeah I didn't make my point clear that it should be easier.

For instance see Perldoc Keyword Search (update3)

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)
Je suis Charlie!}

> that's actually a good idea for extending snippets in my IDE (yasnippet/Emacs) ¹

for the records some trivial templates for yasnippet, which is derived from textmates standard and is similar to snippMate for vim.

Not too far away from Abbrevations in Komodo.

# -*- mode: snippet -*-
# name: caller;
# key: caller
# --
my (${1:$package}, ${2:$filename}, ${3:$line}) = caller;
$0
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# -*- mode: snippet -*-
# name: caller(LEVEL)
# key: caller
# --
my (${2:$package}, ${3:$filename}, ${4:$line}, ${5:$subroutine}, ${6:$
+hasargs},
${7:$wantarray}, ${8:$evaltext}, ${9:$is}_require, ${10:$hints}, ${11:
+$bitmask},
${12:$hinthash}) = caller(${1:$LEVEL});
$0
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please note that both versions of caller are expanded with the same keyword + TAB and you can chose from a dropdown between both versions.

here the example for splice

# -*- mode: snippet -*-
# name: splice @ARR ,OFFSET ,LENGTH ,LIST
# key: splice
# --
splice @${1:ARR} ,${2:OFFSET} ,${3:LENGTH} , ${4:LIST...};
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since I can include code (elisp but also bash or Perl) I'd like to find a way to delete the commas of skipped arguments instead of creating 4 versions for drop down... but I'm still at the beginning.

Vision: Ideally these snippets could be generated from POD-examples and show the documentation¹, I think DBI is a good candidate.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)
Je suis Charlie!}

PS: thanks to Tux for suggesting the return values for stat, (local)time, and caller (with or without args)

¹) probably best realized in combination with autocomplete-mode ... unfortunately emacs-wiki seems to be down at the moment...