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I was curious, and I did a search for "deleted:1 user:me" to see if any of my posts had been deleted, and six had, almost all of them I had deleted myself. For context I have posted around 200 posts on Stack Overflow.

Being able to see deleted posts is indeed an eye-opener, and I also wish more people had this ability, but for a different reason. It makes you aware of the amount of very low quality posts that get posted to Stack Overflow, not to mention spam.

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Yes, I see candidates for deletion in review queue, and most of it is either garbage or "I have this complex problem, please solve it for me after I give you the most vague description of it". Like the one I just saw recently where somebody has a huge pile of legacy Perl code and has trouble figuring it out (and that's all, no specific Perl question). I can feel their pain, but what can be done here except giving the poor soul a hug? So this kind of questions gets closed. And probably the person asking it is very frustrated, but really, what can one do here?

What about hiring an actual Perl programmer?

I've been a Perl programmer once, and I assure you given a pile of legacy Perl code, written in a good old style with good old "everything accesses everything", no comments and clever use of tricky Perl constructs, most people would be inclined to yell for help. It's not specifically Perl's fault, but a constellation of Perl being at the top of its popularity when thinking about who will support it 20 years later didn't exactly enter the mindset of most programmers.

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