Personally I think that you can learn programming in at least two ways: studying it from the ground up and/or step by step, guided by the problems you are trying to solve. That's how our brain manages available memory, right?

The first way to learn takes its roots from rationalism that was put forward by Descartes: one can achieve understanding by pure reasoning and methods.

The second way to learn is a pragmatic way that was developed mostly in the 20th century (Anglo-Sax philosophers Dewey, James).

I don't think you can learn everything about a programming language. Neither you can learn everything about a chess game. There's always something new to find out about it. The more you learn, the more open roads you see.

When I studied Perl at the university, I used the rationalistic way. At my work I take the pragmatic approach. At the university I tended to be slow because very often I didn't know which variable to set, which function to call. On the other hand, I knew the language syntax better. Because I start to forget language syntax, I tend to avoid some nice and clever solutions, choosing a fast and dirty way. That's why sometimes I should forget my day-to-day scripting, sit down and meditate on things, look up the Perl Monks posts.

We live in a postmodern age and if one becomes religious about one way or another of doing things, this seems very suspiscious to me. I think the most principled Perl programmers and best monks here tend to find a solution to each problem they meet and never give up.