Thankyou. Nice counter argument.

All the various similes and analogies limp equally.

I think that my 'sport mode' analogy is very accurate. The only people against the idea are those wizards who see it as training wheels, and the typing of (say) -z on the shebang line an imposition. For most of them it would be typed once into their emacs template or equivalent. A one-time, two keystroke effort.

Instead, another two generations of newbies have to (un)learn the hard way.

• Backwards compatibility.

  For anyone building their own version of Perl, who knew that the would be at risk of this, simply opts out of the use strict; default.

  For P6, if it was enabled this way from the start, this becomes a non-issue. If it isn't, it can never be changed for this reason. P6 is designed to last 20+ years? If it takes off, that's an aweful lot of newbies that have to "discover" it. And let's face it. We will all be newbies.

  Would you consider trying to write your first P6 program without enabling strict and warnings? I know I won't.

• Encouragement of good habits.

  Social issue or not, all those posts that say: "I've tried to enable strict and warnings, but it is just so hard" testify that unlearning bad habits is always harder than learning good ones.