Wise words indeed. I've often wondered about the need to elevate certain individuals in a community to god-like status. This, of course, transcends Perl (and programming languages, and software, and so on) but still, more often than not, seems detrimental. I don't think it really provides an incentive to most programmers, but then again I never paid attention in psychology ;)

Also, as you touched on, near-fanatical devotions to certain paradigms doesn't help much either. Any code that doesn't conform to these specifications is instantly looked down upon. It's also the first thing that's looked for as a problem in posted code, often causing the reviewer to ignore actual errors and give advice like "add use strict, then repost" which doesn't really help anything.

So basically "me too" to the parent post :)

I might be inclined to post that on occasion, when the code shown is messy and the mistake not obvious. So even making an absolute out of "add use strict, then repost posts are useless" is (mostly *g*) useless.

Makeshifts last the longest.

Yes, maybe he is. Did I say otherwise? I said the question is if so.

That TheDamian's code would get shredded for not using strict alone is a pointless fact. I doubt a lot of people would be able to fully grok the stuff he does, let alone recreate it under strictures.

It's not a matter of whether code written by $X is good or bad; it's a matter of the probability of $X writing good code in relation to the probably of oneself writing good code.

Makeshifts last the longest.

it's a matter of the probability of $X writing good code in relation to the probably of oneself writing good code.

True, however, if you can't understand the code, should you really be using it? How maintainable is the code if only Damian knows what it's doing? What's to prevent Damian from taking advantage of his vastly superior knowledge and inserting code that will turn my processor into a nuclear weapon and holding the world hostage until they pay him the sum of 1 Million Dollars! I mean, look at his picture, he's evil. EEEVIL.

if you can't understand the code, should you really be using it?

So you have read, understood and grokked the entire source for perl? :) That of your OS? Its device drivers?

. o O ( What's that dead horse doing in here? )

Makeshifts last the longest.

Hear, hear.