People are loathe to admit it, but not all opinions are created equal. This is particularly true in any technical subject. There are opinions which will cause you to waste time and energy, and lead you to grief again and again. Other opinions will work out much better, time and time again. Therefore if you want to master a technical field, it is important to accept that sometimes there is a technical wrong and right, and knowing that you try to find out what is right and why.

Now you say not to tell people to use strict.pm. I disagree. It is indeed good to avoid saying to use strict.pm in a way that leaves the other person upset. But when you see constructs that clearly indicate that the person is not using that pragma, it will save a lot of their time and energy if you can get them to try it out. Because the win for them is so great, it is important to bring it up.

As for your previous experience, I believe it was at the thread starting at Re: Ways of commenting subroutines. I entered that thread at Re (tilly) 4: Ways of commenting subroutines, and you labelled what I said as an assault. As I said then, I repeat now. What I had to say was not an assault. Instead it is the best advice that I know how to give. I was trying to inform you of the most effective opinions that I know of, and let you know why they are effective. As for why I believe it is an effective opinion, well that would take a good long while to explain in detail. But I believe that it is, I can point to a lot of research indicating that it is, and many top-notch programmers tell me that they agree it is effective.

Now as for what Abigail said, you may disagree with how it was said, but it was right. The question asked was truly not a Perl problem, in that the person asking seemed to know all of the Perl necessary, and the stage the person was at was a design level at which the final language is pretty much irrelevant. And so Abigail pointed that out, and gave detailed feedback on the design issue. Which in this case was the design of the database where data would be kept. And all of the feedback was correct, accurate, and paying attention to it would indeed result in a better project.

You can take that for what it is worth as well.