I'm a little bit saddened by the firm dismissal of (another) anonymonk

The firm dismissal was warranted in my view because he was trolling. Most of what he said was deliberate nonsense -- and he knew it was nonsense -- designed to provoke an emotional response. He even owned up to that here.

I'm a little bit saddened I fell for it though, with the thread quickly degenerating into emotion, not reason. I started with "Of GrandFather's two solutions, from the perspective of DRY, this one is better". I did not claim it as an absolute best solution. As you say, which solution is "better" depends on context and taste.

I wish it had stopped there, but I was baited and responded emotionally. He had me going until he made the fatal mistake of mentioning sundialsvc4, which shocked me into realizing I had been sucked in. So I broke it off immediately. BTW, if you are really him, kudos on successfully baiting me again. :)

Long variable names themselves may induce cognitive load

Nowhere did I endorse long variable names. I assumed it self-evident that long variable names that differ in just one character (such as my example number_of_immortal_perl_monks vs number_of_immoral_perl_monks) show appalling taste and were used only to illustrate a point, while adding a bit of humour.

The second suggested construct that uses values, might also increase cognitive load—for a perl novice—as it involves the concept of aliasing

Of course, like writing style, programming style depends on the audience, the reader. Code read and maintained by Perl experts should be written in a different style to code maintained by Perl novices.

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