I perfectly agree with you. Specialization, like so many other things, however is or can be a blurred concept. And it would be interesting or even desirable to have discussions with monks who share with you other interests besides Perl.

And, of course, discussing flower arrangements, would be pointless here. I was rather focusing on subjects that may end up being related, if possibly loosely, with Perl itself.

To reason on your same example, I think it would not be totally pointless to discuss flower arrangements and analogies of the latter with perl programming with some other monk sharing with you the same interest.

Off topic discussions already arise here and I think you cannot avoid it: most importantly I'm sure that this doesn't lower in any way the quality of communication here, nor does it increase the noise/ratio signal, whereas the typical "specialized" questions a' la "esteemed monks, is it possible to do X in PERL?" do!

In this vein, I was not searching a means to increase this kind of OT posts, but seeking advice wrt how to do what is "unavoidable" (in an obviously weak acceptation of the term) in the less invasive and most appropriate way...