Today I was required to take a TeckChek assessment for Perl/CGI. I was surprised by the nature of the questions and am curious if others have taken this assessment and what they thought of it. My own concerns were:

• Several questions related to the format function, I wasn't aware that was still considered a "common" function for newcomers or mid-perlers , since I have only used it once in 7 years.
• Incorrect syntax for variable creation in sample code
• Several questions related to the English module, which I thought was considered a Bad Thing(tm)
• Verbiage that didn't seem to sound like someone familiar with Perl culture would have written.
• Several questions about the command line debugger. With the advent of better and better Perl GUI debuggers I am wondering how long this will be relevant.
• No questions about use strict or warnings
• No questions about variable scope
• Forced the test taker to be on a Windows machine running either IE or Netscape (no 6 or Mozilla support it seems)
• No questions about module creation
• Overall I felt the questions were antiquated

With TIMTOWTDI being such a part of the Perl culture and the wide range of domains that Perl can be applied to are there currently any good yard sticks by which to measure ones grasp on Perl?

Disclaimer: Possibly some of the above mentioned missing questions were simply not in my assessment do in part to the randomness of the question pool or their "adaptive" process assumed certain aspects were already known.

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