No I didn't go to the mailing lists. I did seek help on Stack Overflow. I also asked the Perl expert at work. He tended to get mad and say things like "that's b

No I didn't go to the mailing lists. I did seek help on Stack Overflow. I also asked the Perl expert at work. He tended to get mad and say things like "that's basic CGI, you should know that". I agree Perl's docs are great. Once I discovered 'man perl op' I was set. My complaint is that Perl differs from other languages where a quick Google of a bit of syntax leads directly to stack overflow question or the language docs. The DBI issue I had was a mix of FreeTDS, Sybase and SQL Server 2008. The combination of an old version of SQL Server and these drivers meant we hit uncommon bugs. My complaint here is how tricky it was to debug. The string has an internal flag to say that it's UTF8. Somehow that was getting set when the encoding was Windows CP1252. It took me a long time to learn about how Perl stored these Strings. Even longer to resolve the issue it caused. Something about packing and unpacking a string just felt harder than it needed to be. The experience left a me disliking Perl. I worked with a Perl backend for almost a decade. I love not working with it now. I don't blame Perl for it's difficult to Google syntax, or it's design choices for backwards compatibility. I know some people are Perl grandmasters and can do amazing things with it in short time ( I worked with one ). But to me I didn't like it, it felt out dated and harder to use than any other scripting language that I've used. Debuggers may well exist. My initial attempts at getting one running failed, but that was years ago. If there are good debuggers out there I'm happy to admit I'm wrong on that front.