Brothers and Sisters,
I am just a couple weeks shy of having been at the Monastery 11 months, as well as discovering Perl. I never matriculated into college, so I do not have any knowledge of what classical "programming" is supposed to be. I am self taught in BASIC where I used goto as often as I could. That code could be described a spaghetti string at best. I literally used variables a-z and then started with a1 if I happened to use all 26. No indenting - well you get the picture.

I then dabbled in Pascal - and hated it. I learned enough C to write "hello, world" programs (really I got about as good as I was at BASIC), but thought the language was about as interesting as watching paint dry. I am not a professional programmer - I have never been paid for a single line of code. I solve problems - and sometimes I do that with code. So to this end, I have also written a lot of *nix shell scripts.

And then I found Perl. I am not going to get into how great the language is, or what the limitations are - this post isn't about that. I want to know how I can map my progress. The end goal after all is to realize that Perl is the game. I mentioned in the Chatter Box the other day that I have 13 books on Perl. The reasoning - I don't know what I need to know until I need to know.

I am familiar with the 7 stages and would rate myself barely a hacker. I found myself giving tutelage to another monk on references and closures and realized that I had assimilated this information without realizing it. I have grown in other areas and the point of this post is not to boast, but rather to find out what I don't know. Is there some checklist the Saints keep hidden away in one of the *hey - vroom is teleporting again* secret chambers? Some would argue that you only need to know enough to do the task at hand. I agree, but in my case I am not getting paid for this - I invent my own projects - so how do I challenge myself to learn something new?

Ok - I have become too verbose and think I may be babbling. I guess what I am saying is that I know what I know - how do I know what I don't know?

Cheers - L~R

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