I have met several avid Perl developers in my line of work and at conferences that have been abundantly helpful. IRC users, on the other hand, can be somewhat of a disaster. I was working a script and couldn't find in the documentation of how to set a custom error code with "die". I decided to ask in #perl on freenode, but I was constantly "trolled" with some of the users spamming "Have you considered reading the documentation?". One of these users did in fact answer my question (just use exit), seconds before I was banned. When I pm'd the user who banned me, he explained to me that I had "not answered his question whether I had answered the documentation". Heh.

Ironically, the user that banned me runs a blog whose most recent blog post was regarding "Exit statuses and how $? works". So I guess my question wasn't so stupid after all.

I have heard that #perl on OFTC is slightly more sane and helpful, but can't attest for that personally.