Like you, andrew_levinson, I started out as a self-taught Programmer (mumble)-teen years ago. What I found in Perl Monks is a combination of sitting in on late-night bull-session between a lot of very bright people, and a School with a very diverse set of Tutors. A non-trivial posting will generate several different approaches to the solution. I get to see real-world examples of things I only had a nodding acquaintance with (the Schwartzian Transform, the Orc-ish maneuver), and things I have never seen before (formal graph and set theory, List::Util, functional programming). Perl Monks is a mind-stretcher. At least once a day I will run into something that makes me sit back and think 'What!?! that's a neat way to do that. Let me make a note of this' (Thank you Abigail, in all your incarnations, Merlyn, Tye, Limbic~Region, Corion, brian d foy, diotalevi, Ovid, chromatic, I could go on for the next couple of days).

I have been exposed to a lot of different aspects of Programming through the Monastery. As a non-Perl programmer, I have done more business 'payroll/ accounting/ inventory' applications than I care to mention. As a Sysprog/sys-admin I have written more than a few Q&Ds in REXX or shell to address a systems-programming issue, a lot of it write-once and throw-away scripts. You develop some some strange habits writing code like that....

I came into Perl from the sys-admin side of the House and got sucked into the role of Perl Developer, when I found that Perl put the minimum number of barricades between what I could visualized and the code that actually implemented my Idea. I have been accused of thinking in Perl by my co-workers; I point out that using Perl as a short-hand to illustrate an idea beats using APL....

I came to the Monastery because it was a place to learn about Perl. I stay with the Monastery because it has People Who Think. (And, coincidentally, I am still learning Something New daily.)

Update: Corrected typeos (Thank You Limbic~Region).