Strict is _not_ a newbie pragma. Together with 'use warnings;' or '-w' it can save you hundreds of hours of debugging. When I'm interviewing a prospective applicant for the shop I work at, and I look at the applicant's code, a failure to use strict is almost always grounds for a negative recommendation. It's simply irresponsible practice to program without it. You don't need an 'expert_mode' pragma, BTW. There's already a 'no strict;' that you can turn off for blocks in which you're going to be using symbolic references or something. I agree that strict should on by default, but one of all of my 5-liners will always be 'use strict;'.