Everything undergoes trials and tests from time to time, of varying severity and intensity. This includes Perl, yourself, and your Perl programming abilities.

When tested one can either be strong enough to resist without breaking, or supple enough to bend with the force applied and avoid the challenge even though you did not directly resist. Sometimes one way is correct, sometimes the other; somebothes both, and sometimes either.

However as you can be strong and supple in defence, so can the attack be strong or supple -- as one challenge can be forcefull and direct, another can be stealthy, agile and subtle, attacking a weakness you were never aware of so never knew how to defend (see 90% of attempts at crypto by people who know nothing about crypto). Here strength does not help your survival, indeed rigidity at the expense of versatility and suppleness will hamper your ability to overcome the challenge. You need innovation, initiative and vision to come up with a solution where you lack sufficient context to rely solely on your formal knowledge.

I am happy that the foundations of a skyscraper are deepset, solid and strong, and I am also happy that the upper storeys of the skyscaper will flex and sway in the wind -- the overall strength of the building comes from both these acting to complement, not weaken, the other.

Though many coding challenges can be overcome by brute force and encyclopeadic knowledge, there are many more that require understanding of the subtleties of the language and the problem, and an ability to innovate and grow solutions almost organically from where no formal specification exists for a brute strength fix to work. Strength and savvy in concert can overcome any problem where one on it's own would have failed.