Most people will also know by now that "PERL" is not the proper way to spell it and that anyone spelling it that way clearly has no clue about the language...
And so knew I... or at least I thought I knew...
You see, for the past years I've been led to believe that anyone spelling it "PERL", or mistaking "perl" with "Perl" probably had no idea what he/she was talking about...
Back to the present: here in Lisbon, recently, a company decided to hire a reasonable amount of Perl developers. This has led a bunch of companies to search for programmers they could assemble in a team to give to that other company.
I and lots of others have been bombarded with emails from several companies, some known, some unknown.
I've been forwarding these companies to jobs.perl.org.
Now comes the interesting part:
One of the persons who contacted me kept refering to the language as "perl" or "PERL" (in emails). I assumed the person wasn't really into the language, but rather just in pursuit of candidates.
Then, a couple of days later, I had dinner with that person and a couple of others and discussed, among other things, the quest of finding real good Perl programmers.
Discussing technical issues, I got to see that the person wasn't as clueless as I had thought at first... In fact, although I haven't seen any of his code, he seemed to know pretty much about the basics and the most advanced stuff, and he didn't seem to be the sort of person who'd have much trouble separating seasoned Perl programmers from wannabees.
All in all, the person kind of convinced me (that he was, at the very least, a decent Perl programmer who knew his way around CPAN).
My final thought on this person is: it's not that he's not into the language, because he clearly is, it's just that he's not into the Perl community and doesn't know certain things...
And now I wonder: how many wrong assumptions might I have made in the past?