[qntm]

The "There's more than one way to do it" sucks for trying to teach Perl too. You can't just teach one way; you need to teach every way, so that students can understand what they're seeing in the wild. This makes it take three times as long to explain the basics of Perl, simply because there are, essentially, three times as many basics.

[chromatic]

My experience is different. I spent a lot of time in the beginning teaching the three or four important theoretical parts of Perl (lists, context, monomorphic operators, and coercion) and then explained how to use the documentation. That leaves only a couple of places where the difference between approaches is substantial enough that it needs explaining. Dereferencing syntax is one such wart. Choosing an object system used to be another place where opinions varied enough that it mattered, but now teaching Moose by default is obviously enough correct that it's a boring choice.

[adrianhoward]

Yup. I've not taught perl for a while - but that pretty much matches my experiences. The N ways of doing "good" OO was the biggest problem I encountered and Moose solves that.