in reply to Tracking Perl Progress

I suppose this depends largely on what you mean by "tracking progress". Are you wishing to track personal progress? Or, is it the progress of colleagues, subordinates, students, potential employees/contractors, etc. (or some combination)?

The idea of "progress" is highly personal, and as such it is often a mistake to try to put numbers on things like skill and experience. Well, to a point, anyhow.

From the point of view of a hiring manager (in a past life), my thoughts on some of your criteria:

If I were to try to score a potential employee, the criteria would be something like:
  1. real-world experience (time)
  2. familiarity with solving diverse types of problems
  3. familiarity with a number of Perl resources (knows about Perlmonks, various USENET groups, CPAN, etc.)
  4. ability to spot common "gotchas" in code (e.g. spot where a use of '||' instead of 'or' might cause problems)
  5. knowledge of best practices for writing new code (e.g. use of strict, warnings, POD)
  6. knowledge of when Perl is not the correct choice, and ideas about alternatives
  7. understanding of different development models (e.g. RUP, XP), and methods (e.g. procedural, OO, functional)
  8. willingness to find/use existing modules to solve problems (perhaps tested by development of a simple solution for a made-up, but realistic, problem that is 90% solved on CPAN)
  9. an awareness of what (s)he does not know
Even these would be rather hard to assign numerical values to without a large degree of subjectivity...

Yoda would agree with Perl design: there is no try{}