A professional is a professional. A thousand years ago, under the guild system, if someone claimed to be of a specific rank in a guild, you could be reasonably certain that this person could do X, Y, and Z. You (usually) didn't get awarded a given rank without having performed a certain amount of work to demonstrate your skill.

I'm not advocating that Perl go the route of certifications or other such items. But, when I write code to be maintained by other Perl professionals, I expect a strong understanding of certain concepts. Things like recursion, references, safe I/O interaction, and the like. I expect a passing familiarity with others, such as the symbol table.

No, I don't expect that only wizards will maintain my code, but I also don't expect that monkeys will, either. Now, if my employer chooses to employ a monkey to maintain my code after asking me to write Hal (of "I can't let you do that, Dave" fame), that's my employer's problem, not mine.