But leaving the gifted ones aside..

So you want my opinion: ten years are enough to practice basic things fluently, at least for me. I had no scientific backgroud, nor a programming one. I work now as sysadmin and I try to automate many tasks with Perl so when I work with Perl in my main fields I write programs quite fast. When i go to explore other fields (such web programming using Dancer2 for example) I still suffer of slow learning times.

The fact is that I like programming in Perl because I feel it as a sane interaction with the machine, so mostly in the past, i passed many hours of my spare time programming. I have many limits and many things to improve: testing and preparing good distributions are ontop of my todo list.

It is many times a matter of aptitude: what is your standard for good software? Perl make the job done quickly: this is a good thing but can limit you in the research of good software at the state of the art of Perl programming. I tell the difference between Perl programmers and Perl scriptor. see Re: A use strict confession, with real questions. (Perl scriptors and Perl programmers) and the whole thread to see what i mean.

L*

update: traversing my main boilerplate directory it seems i have wrote lot of programs (without takin in the count remote systems and private home pc)

find -name *.p[lm] | perl -lne "$h{(localtime((stat($_))[10]))[5]+1900
+}++;END{map{print qq($_ $h{$_})} sort keys %h}"

2012 1176 (but this year i restored from bkp..)
2013 205
2014 1210
2015 730
2016 54
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