Of course they would rather just have him do it. And that's when you go from being just another guy on the tech team to an incredibly useful employee and mentor by saying "Why don't I come over to your desk and we'll work on it together in Perl?" or "You can do this in Perl with a hash and a foreach loop. Take a look at this example in Learning Perl. Why don't you give it a try?" That's how I learned Perl.