> The one downside for me is the TIMTOWTDI philosophy of Perl.

Freedom is hard. Only the pure slave has one and only one path to follow.

As you are somehow new to Perl this can be confusing, but you stated you liked the similarity to bash, awk, grep, sed and other tools you commonly use on the command line. People coming from C recognize other similarities, functional programmers find they can program with Perl in the way they like, as OO people do. For what I saw from wiser monks Perl permits any programming tecnique without complaining.

This is the malleability ait is speaking about. This is what makes, in my opinion, Perl a humanistic language: the programmer is as free as possible to choose their own way to reach their goals.

I started as you as hobby (but many years ago) and after the first shocking impact with sigils (I wrote just few html tags before: no basic, no batch, no bash) I found very comfortable with Perl exactly because it permitted me to express myself in a primitive way without complaining. Then it is up to you to change the approach, but only if you have the need. I wrote my first real module (not a mess of exported subroutines, a real module) ten years later or so. Only recently (2 years ago) I wrote a real module with a decent test suite worth to be published on CPAN.

So, as you are writing from an abbey near Augusta Trevorum, you can now meditate about aribitrium with this sentences from my homeland: liberum arbitrium est habitus animae liber sui

L*