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Anyone who has ever posted to a Perl forum/mailing list using "PERL" will more than likely have received a reply pointing out the mistake. Anyone who's spent some time reading these forums and lists will certainly have come across a thread discussing this issue. There are published books with reference to this spelling and the perlfaq has a piece on it. For someone to still use the spelling I can only think that either s/he has not been exposed to these resources enough (and I think it'd be hard to becomes a competent Perl programmer without that) or does not care enough to correct his mistake. Not caring about one's own mistakes is one of the things that really hold you back as a programmer and is a very annoying trait in a boss. We all do it to a certain extent, but letting it shine forth in job-related communication (which should be as professional as possible) is not good advertising.

So, I agree, PERL is a big warning flag. As with any rule, there are exceptions.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian W. Kernighan

In reply to Re: PERL as shibboleth and the Perl community by tirwhan
in thread PERL as shibboleth and the Perl community by merlyn

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