While I would cheerfully bet your paycheck that you have been in software longer than I have, I think there is a bit of a 2-way street between keeping to what other people know, and teaching them more about the tool.

If you do code reviews and 40% of developers find your code obscure, then possibly you do need to work on making your code clearer. OTOH possibly you need to work on educating them so that they understand your code, and work more effectively themselves. I think it is good for a company to decide that its standards for new employees include a learning curve, and that learning curve shall include mastering a set of features which may or may not be in wide use elsewhere.

I think that is particularly true with a language like Perl where most people who claim on their resume to know it actually know it very poorly.

Note that I am not saying that all problems are to be solved by teaching your fellow co-workers. There is a balance to be reached between using features that make you personally more productive, and keeping to what is generally known.

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