It wasn't just you they were defending, but rather a fundamental philosophy about how to treat newcomers to PerlMonks and newcomers to Perl.

Also, our job as more experienced monks is to model good diagnostic and problem solving skills. Suggesting that X is the problem when X has nothing to do with the problem is hardly good modelling.

Welcome to Perl and welcome to PerlMonks!

As for wanting it to print 20 times, you'll need a for-loop for that rather than a simple "if" statement. "if" statements evaluate a condition just once. For loops repeat until a particular condition is met. See For Loops.