I don't think that it's a "single moment of clarity" thing. It's more like a gradual process. When I first started writing Perl, my code looked like C (but that's OK - Larry said so!) These days I'm far more comfortable with Perl idioms, but there was no single point when I suddenly thought "Aha! I'm a Perl programmer now." I can look back on code that I wrote only a few weeks ago and improve it using techniques that I've learnt since then.

I'm gradually becoming a better and better Perl programmer, but there are plenty of people around who are far better than me. I see enough of their code to realise that I've still got a long way to go - and that's part of the fun of Perl!

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me