look like you need to broaden your computing horizons my friend. There is more than one language to do it. The fewer blindspots you have the better you are. Preventing wheel reinvention is what the CPAN is for and if you had remained blind to cron you might have written a Perl daemon with a lot more effort. Don't think outside the box think outside the octagon.
YOu are right though Perl day in day out can make you blind and certainly a poorer programmer as you are exposed to fewer solutions and eventualities. I usually turn to computing magazines or websites to keep me up to date with the problem space of our everychanging world. You message should therefore be don't use Perl all the time for everthing just because you like it. Your lucky being artistic I find it hard to work out my brain any other way.
