http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=513453


in reply to Five Common Misconceptions While Learning Perl

1. Everyone who goes through the trouble of writing a Perl tutorial must know what they are talking about. Everyone who goes through the trouble of writing a Perl tutorial should know what they are talking about. However, Rule 1 ("Other people are a constant source of disappointment") applies to programming, as to all other walks of life.

2. Prior experience in another language makes you qualified to write perl without learning the basics. Prior experience in another language will give you just enough confidence to shoot yourself in the foot with Perl, repeatedly.

3. The documentation is terse and hard to navigate. This is false. The documentation is verbose, rambling, riddled with confusing attempts at humor, needlessly complex, and hard to navigate. It is, however, not terse.

4. The Perl community is an automatic answer machine. False. Tom Christiansen was the automatic answer machine; but he was decomissioned after the CIA watched the movie _War Games_, and grew afraid of Artificial Intelligences like him.

5. Modules are a crutch for people who can't do it themselves. Again, false. Modules are a crutch for people who can do it for themselves. They allow huge groups of people to suffer from exactly the same set of bugs simultaneously, rather than having to invent their own, distinct, set of customized bugs. This allows exploit writers to target a larger segment of the population, and keeps security professionals employed to stop them.