Whether I point that out to them depends on their Perl skills and their personality.
I doubt that an (argumentative) Perl newbie is likely to "know better" than Tom Christiansen and Damian Conway on the complex issue of Perl prototypes.
Unfortunately, as Beth once noted:
In the late 1990's Justin Kruger and David Dunning did a series
of studies demonstrating that the less skillful had a tendency
to overrate their abilities and fail to recognize expertise in others.
And I really don't want to encourage debate with
people like this. :)
Update: The wayback machine url for this historic argumentative bulletin board exchange seems to intermittently fail, so I'll embed bk's famous quote here. This classic quote, the inspiration for Acme::USIG, is from "bk" to davorg after davorg had the temerity to suggest that starting Perl scripts with use strict was a good idea:
No,but its true-- strict really does suck. I hate it. Its gay. Dont tell me ehat to do. And nobody wants your to be back, either.
