No worries, no offense taken :-) On a different day, I might have posted both solutions.

Coming from the perspective of learning Perl, I completely agree with you that learning the basics first is the better way to go. When I learned e.g. the Fourier transform, our professor first had us do it entirely by hand for a while, before we learned how to use the tables. The tables are of course much easier to use, but I still think it was important to know the "hard way" of doing it.

Coming from the perspective of someone Googling and looking for a quick solution to copy-and-paste, I think showing the more robust one first and making clear that it's the "better" solution is better. After all, maybe someone will implement Stack Overflow Autocomplete for Perl someday ;-)