Hanging around in the monastery I learnt about Perl constructs that I completely ignored

Yesterday, for example, I learnt about the behaviour of split when passed a negative LIMIT parameter. Months ago I read about the bistable .. operator...

Personally I think that you can learn a 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?

In either case, I believe, you tend to learn very well the constructs you use, keep ready in a drawer for a later use the interesting features that you didn't use yet, and completely forget all the rest.

This way, you never have a complete knowledge of the language.

But some people have, it seems. Many of the replies I read here about things that were completely unknown to me always came from the same three/four people. And that's amazing to me.

I'd like to hear from you about these points:

• do you think it is possible to know everything about a programming language?
• are day-by-day problem-solving tasks a limitation on the things that you can learn about the language?
• how important is the presence of a community, real or, like perlmonks, virtual?

...and, last but not least, did I miss something important in my reasoning?

Thanks in advance for your opinions

--bronto

# Another Perl edition of a song:
# The End, by The Beatles
END {
  $you->take($love) eq $you->make($love) ;
}

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