Typically ./ is excluded from the path for security reasons. Probably not a big deal in this case (there are more single user, a.k.a. desktop, machines running linux these days than multi-user servers per se). But say on a multi-user machine, some mischevious user creates a bash script called "ls" and puts it in some group writable directory that you do much work in. According to your PATH that ls would be called before the real ls and it would do whatever that mischevious person created it to do. For example, mail your ssl private key to themselves, or /etc/shadow if you foolishly have ./ in your path as root. Of course, their script would then call the real ls then delete itself and you would be none the wiser.
Anyway, I'm not picking on your advice, I would just like people to be aware that ./ is excluded from the path for a very good reason. If you just get used to typing ./program.pl now, you might save yourself problems in the future.