Re: Is it correct?

[whakka]

If you can answer all of these questions with a definitive "yes" then you are either a grand-poobah Perl master or you are a liar of the double-nth degree (that assuming the coding problem isn't a trivial one).

I think all of these questions have an answer on a sliding scale. However, as a novice I have to say that it's not all that important if all of these questions can be answered toward the "yes" direction right away. Except perhaps 3) and 4), which I regard in the same way - you should always write code as if you will forget everything you've done in a month. Because I usually do - darn that lack of experience! But I think verbosity should be encouraged in the beginning, and only after you're comfortable doing something should you try to strike the balance you mention. And not completely understanding code or knowing if it will work in all situations can lead to interesting lessons (unless you have to care about security of course) and revelations later on. I think most would agree, especially if they are doing funny things with dependencies that they don't know the intricate details of.

The most important thing though from your post is that you should always be asking yourself these questions, usually implicitly, for every piece of code you write. That's the advice I would give to fellow novices.