If your co-worker is new to perl, maybe he's just having problems learning? I can barely remember learning my second programming language, but I do believe the 2nd one is the most difficult. You just keep thinking you *know* how to do things in the language you already know, and its 'easy', yet you have to go figure out how to do it all over again. Especlly learning while working to deadlines is very frustrating, you don't have time to stop and try things out, or explore, because there's this constant nag in the background, that you have a time limit.

Some people also just don't like to learn generally, they're not good at new stuff, it just takes ages and lots of repeats to stick in their brains. It's not necessarily a bad thing, though they will tend to always solve similar problems the same way, and not see/understand new or better ways.

Some of use (programmers) are just plain ornery, and get our work done better by trying to show it who's master, and that involves grumbling at it sometimes ,)

As for me, I like solving problems, and learning new stuff, even if I take a while to be convinced of its usefulness sometimes. I hate doing it to deadlines, but thats life I guess. (Especially when the deadline has passed, and people keep finding bugs in my code, and I've gone on to other things... dumdidum..)

Virus, what virus? Do you mean constantly niggling at how to do some bit of coding, while doing other things, like shopping or whatever? I like it, its invigorating!

C.