I have same experiences as you. I can remember arguing with my friend about how inflexible "use strict" made Perl feel--Like it was trying to force C idioms ont

I have same experiences as you. I can remember arguing with my friend about how inflexible "use strict" made Perl feel--Like it was trying to force C idioms onto a dynamic language (having to define variables, for example). But yeah, after running into bug after bug in my programs I finally saw the light... The Perl community has pretty clearly collectively decided that "use strict" is the thing to do. I firmly believe the only reason it isn't the default behavior of Perl is because the core community holds backwards compatibility in such high regard.