However, when we're teaching seminars or writing books, we mostly focus on one or two onion layers; those that concern syntax and grammar. Learning to program, learning to create applications, is so much more than focusing on how to get the syntax checker to not bail out when we put characters together, it's about creating efficient, effective and pretty applications that last and can continue development later on. So we have to change the way we teach Perl (and for that matter, every single language and stack in the world). I'll focus on what I think we should do, but we'll first have to see what we do (wrong) and how to do it right.