This article works in theory, not so much in practice. The theory is fine, it's the reality of working in the real world where it is less fine. I think the author needs to rethink his approach in the context of a limited budget.

If your goal is to grow your junior engineers at any cost, great article. If your goal is to balance the benefit to the company/project with growing a junior engineer, less great.

And perl? For production code? I love me some perl, I really do, and I've written production code in perl (but it took 2 complete rewrites before I figured out how to do maintainable code in perl). I would not let a junior engineer anywhere near perl for production code.