Perhaps "experience" should be called "popularity" or some such thing. There's absolutely no consistent relationship between experience and Perl skill (eg. not long ago, I had a CB discussion with a bishop who didn't even understand the concept of "server software", having absolutely no idea what a "server" was).

One can have high experience without even really knowing Perl, and low experience and be an extremely talented hacker. The generally common traits among those with high XP though, are:

• Good writing skills
• Pick popular topics that people want to hear about
• $title =~ /(Linux is great|Windows sucks)/i pretty much guarantees at least 20-30 xp for any given post
• Good storytellers
• Their opinions are inline with those of the people reading their posts (do you really think that someone writing a post about how great it's been to have Microsoft fund ActiveState is going to get a lot of votes, compared to one expressing an opinion to the contrary?)

None of these things (except perhaps writing skills, which are only a very small part of the whole development process) are indicative of skill with any programming language.

I'm both surprised, and disappointed that the whole topic of "experience" and concerns about "Why did this get downvoted?", "When do you downvote?", "Why do I have high experience even though I barely know Perl", etc. keeps coming up.

Who are the hackers and who are the XP whores?