I think there's an analogy to coding as well: it's hard to tell if a task is easy; or if a master is making it look easy. Past a certain point, you just have to look at who's impressed by who... you lose the capacity to judge fairly for yourself.
This is paradoxically true with Perl, I think. Initially the novice is amazed and bewildered that the line noise of a given piece of code does something amazing. Later, when you gain greater facility you being to realize that while the code works, it may be taking advantage of Perl's ability to write fast and loose solutions to transient problems, but what's really impressive is the crystalline, lucid gems that are effortless to read and present themselves as paragons of programmer intention. Later still, you see that some of what seems to make complete sense and is useful every day is in fact a manifestation of deep magic. Perl seems to me to be fractally complex in this realm - each epiphany leads me to a new confusion as rich as that I've left behind.

In reply to Re^6: Zen and the art of ignoring XP by willyyam
in thread Zen and the art of ignoring XP by DaWolf

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