Has anyone else had a similar experience? Is it just that Perl is a good fit with hackerly intuition? Do most people here stick by the traditional methods, or is a more flexible (ad-hoc?), go-with-what-works approach more popular?

IMHO, it all depends on the complexity of the problem vs. your solving ability for this problem (knowledge of similar solutions, the programming language's library, knowledge of general problem solving methods, creative fits, ...).

The ratio (well, why not a ratio) of these two factors is what I would call the "perceived complexity" of a problem. This is what determines the approach for me. If it is very high, I go and ask other people. If it is just high, I usually start to paint pictures of it, and unnerve other people by forcing the problem on them, allowing me to gain understanding by talking about it. If it is middle, I usually start some kind of prototyping operation. If it is low, I just write the program.

In Perl, a lot of things are simpler because there are so many pre-solved problems. If you know Perl (and its module library) well, you know very many solutions to very many problems. This is not true to this degree for any other language I know of.

Doing really conceptual thinking in Perl is sometimes hard for me, because the syntax interferes too much with the thinking. I really like programming in Scheme for those purely conceptual things.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com