I know exactly what you mean Zecho. My first time was with references, can you believe it? :-) There was something keeping me from groking it. I just couldn't put my finger on it. Then someone was explaining it to me and that last piece of the puzzle finally clicked into place and the lightbulb went off! At that point, it all made sense. I've been happily using references ever since.

My point is that this experience is part of what makes perl so desirable to me. With perl, there seems to be a tremendous desire to help people learn. It manifests itself through many ways: the CB, IRC, FTF conversations with friends/collegues, conferences, or books. I feel like people want me to understand. This is A Good Thing(tm). I imagine the same thing exists for other languages, but I speak only of my personal experience.

I have gathered a tremendous amount of knowledge by lurking on mailing lists, reading books, examining other's code, and going to user groups. In return, I feel a need to give back to the community that helped me grow from a HTML novice to a good perl programmer over the years.

IMHO, this is the essence of perl. Contribute back to the ones that helped you. CPAN is an excellent example of this. If I want sessions for my web app, I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. I just use Apache::Session, and whisper a "Thank you" to Jeffrey Baker et al. for making it available. I imagine this sort of scenario happens on a daily basis around the world.

So the next time that light goes on, be sure to say thanks to whoever or whatever helped you gain that insight. Pass on that warm fuzzy feeling to someone else. And in the process you'll become better yourself.