This is going to hurt...
<UPDATE>
It IS hurting (XP-wise). Let me just make clear that i am NOT advocating overall coding-anarchy, and that all of us should be using gotos everywhere - i'm simply asking how much personal, completly irrational "style" is possible without compromising too much efficiency.
</UPDATE>


Let me start off by stating that i am not using strict.
Let me add that i'm usually dont use warnings.

There, now that i have your attention, I'd like to get something off my mind that has been troubling me for a while now:
How important are all of the standard coding-rules that get mentioned in just about every thread here? (use CGI.pm! use strict! use warnings! use placeholders! use OO! use templates! use CGI::Application!). I know that each and every single one of these dogmas has its very good reasons, can boost efficiency, improve maintainability, lets you get 'run over by a bus' without anybody caring too much, make you more lazy, increase your hubris and presumably even lower your cholestorol.
But i've been hanging around with a couple of Basis (tm) BBX (tm) programmers these days (for those that don't know: thats a rather nasty BASIC-dialect, IMHO), and i even managed not to go blind looking at their (even for BASIC standards) horrible code. they didn't know anything about SQL, subroutines, code-refactorisation, beauty of code, assembler, registers, memory-usage, operating systems, OOP, etc.
But their code still works. and it works well.
My point being: i'm somewhere in-between. i know about all those 'higher concepts', but i often don't use them, either because i can really live without them (strict), "don't feel like it" (templates), consider myself incompatible with the concepts (OOP) or simply have too much mental inertia (CGI::App).
This obviously leads to suboptimal, yet (and not in the sense of 'a dirty hack') working code. I just wanted to ask whether i'm alone out here, because i'm really starting to feel intimidated around here lately - the whole meta-TIMTOWTDI-thing kinda seems to have taken the back seat, and this whole compsci/javaesque (no offense! {at all}) mentality seems to be very en vogue, and i'd bet that that scares off a lot of perl-coders that are slightly under my level, since it obviously takes a while to understand all those recommendations, and to appreciate them, and because they usually kill that BASICesque 'look, ma! my program is asking me for my name! tomorrow i'll program strong AI!' feeling that coding-toddlers love (and need) so much.
and in the real world (at least in the technological backwaters i'm swimming around in), it seems quite possible to survive (albeit not excel) without strictly following all those rules.
so:
am i alone, and simply one of few lousy, undisciplined coders, or is perlmonks (as much as i love it!) a bit too perfectionistic at times??

In reply to Perlmonk's "best pratices" in the real world by schweini

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