Frankly, I don't see the for loop as a red flag. So what if people have experience in other languages. I started coding long before Larry started thinking about a new language. Besides, I do use the for loop every now and then. Why? Because it's more flexible. It requires just minimal changes if you want every other element instead of each element. Or if halfway during the pass, you decide you have to skip the next few elements. And sometimes, it's just very convenient to have the index number.

To me a red flag is more like "that way works, sure, but did you know there's a much easier way?". Or in fact, it's maybe "that works, but you don't have to write code that way in Perl -- who told you you did?".

For me, such an attitude doesn't differ much from

A lot of you seemed to interpret it as "if you do this, you're a bad programmer"

For me, a red flag is nothing more than "hmmm, why is (s)he using this? Bad coding, or is there something else?".

Abigail