I have never bought the concept of baby perl because
ones has soon to deal with adult code.
To the contrary, it seems to me that most people who use
Perl at some point never deal with, let alone learn to
handle, "adult code". Interview people who list Perl on
their resume (and actually used it) and see how many have
not, for instance, learned how references and objects work.
Even though this is not a particularly esoteric feature
either of Perl or programming, I am confident that you will
find that most have not. And God forbid that you should
ask about a feature like closures which has not been hyped
in various big name languages for the last decade. Most
people at least feel obligated to say that they have heard
of OO and planned to learn it at some point...