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webfiend
<p>Definitely ++ on this and most of the followup comments!</p>
<p>Most of my programming jobs have been of the "lone coder" variety, where somebody handed me a task and left me alone except for weekly checkins ("Looks cool! Does it parse [id://39205|Japanese and Chinese] yet?"). Good for the ego, but poison for learning more than the occasional tidbit.</p>
<p>I've had exactly one development job where I worked daily on the same project as another programmer. In the 6 months there, I became comfortable with CPAN, references, OO Perl, HTML::Template, CGI.pm, <tt>use strict</tt>, and the <tt>-w</tt> flag. I also learned a lot of non-Perl things: Apache configuration, code reviews, and the technique of swearing loudly at the computer as a stress release mechanism. Mind you, this was my first full-time development position, but I suspect that the learning rate would be similar in another job working in a close team.</p>
<p>I am very happy to note that Perlmonks is a comparable environment. Every day I come in and see people [id://169437|doing things] in Perl that never even occurred to me. And it doesn't stop at Perl, either. Reading [tilly]'s old comments sparked an interest in LISP, which I've started playing with today - <em>mostly to take a break from re-reading Programming Perl :-)</em>.</p>
<p>Anyways - I'm definitely "aspiring", and it's nice to be around others who are aspiring or already there.</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>"All you need is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure."-- Mark Twain</blockquote>
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