I'm really wondering what this is all about. Are people here *really* arguing against merlyn's opinion with the argument that everyone should have his own opinions?

• It is absolutely not necessary that my company cares how I write the term "perl." Hell, they even say I shouldn't use "map" so they don't get confused. So that is nothing they would count on.
• Personally, as someone who has a toe in the community, I'd rather hire someone that knows the difference between "Perl" and "perl." But that's just an example. If I have the feeling that person has been touched by the spirit of TIMTOWTDI, is interested in developing in Perl and has experience, it's not that wild he jumped over that FAQ.
• But I also can understand merlyns position, which is a lot more into Perl and the community itself than mine, and even *I* would care about this stuff.

I mean, where would it stop? It's not that crucial to development in Perl to know that there's no PERL, or that there's a difference between "Perl" and "perl." At least the last part becomes an issue when you're e.g. trying to get help in Usenet. But we could go further and say, the principle of TIMTOWTDI isn't that important to a programmer. And then, how can we curse someone that he's not using map, grep, or any other stuff that he doesn't know from PHP?

One might say the difference is that the latter is about the tools you use, the first about the community and the spirit of Perl. Well, personally, I see the community as the mightiest tool, and the spirit of Perl as one of the keys to it.