nysus I agree with you totally. It's pretty frustrating at times when I cannot figure out how to do something that seems pretty simple. Yet the younger members of the Monastery write code that I cannot begin to understand parts of.

What is really frustrating is to see where you fit in the my age is chart. (Let's just say I fit towards the lower section of the chart).

I had a conversation with crazyinsomniac about some of these same thoughts not long ago. What puts things into perspective for me is:

How do you use Perl ?

What percent of your daily job requires Perl ?

Without Perl, could you still perform your job ?

I'm a sys admin. Perl makes my life easier as a sys admin. Yes, I could get along without Perl, but it would take longer and wouldn't be as interesting!

I'm pretty sure that if I were to post the ideas that I was working on on Perlmonks, one of the "boy-geniuses" you mentioned would have a solution in a very short time. But to me, that is part of the fun of it. Figuring it out for yourself. There is no better resource for doing that than Perlmonks that I'm aware of.