If I ever master Perl, I will let you know the symptoms.

*grin*

Actually this really reminds me of a phrase that I first heard in ping-pong. Someone was asked how he was, and he answered, Well I am good enough that if you think you are good, I am probably better, but if you are good enough to know what I mean, you are probably better. The point being, of course, that if you have never met people who know how to play, you aren't very good. But if you play seriously then you wouldn't usually think of yourself as good because you are painfully aware that there are better people out there.

It is the same way with programming. There are a lot of people who think that they are very good because they have never been exposed to good people. The person you describe sounds like one of those to me. Is knowing how to look something up in the index of a book which is better replaced by knowing how to search the POD really mastery of Perl? Gee, I know that I went well beyond that level of competence without, for instance, appreciating strict, or knowing how to use Exporter to ease the pain of the package command.

But sadly, even then I knew more about Perl than the vast majority of people you see in interviews who call themselves Perl programmers. :-(