NO, I disagree! I think that there is a certain level of reasonability to be expected here. If the person in question really thinks about it - Perl's origins stem from the need to crunch through tomes of text. There stands to reason that our traditional string functions like lenght, substring, etc., would be in the language right from the get go!

I think the hardest part about tutorials, teaching students, or developing staff is fostering the correct foundations of common sense.

Maybe what we need is a tutorial on how to RTFM. That was one skill I learned early on in my career. :)