Yes, your "sports mode" analogy certainly is much less faulty than some others, but that doesn't make it very precise. It cannot convey one-liner vs application, and it shears completely once you start considering that you can very well use modules written to run under strictures in one-liners (LWP::Simple, anyone?), and ever more so since such a module might itself be using other modules that are not written to run under strictures… But it wasn't my aim to dispute each metaphor individually.

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.

I never claimed otherwise. I did say that the overwhelming majority of the teaching material available, whether that be for those who learn by example of for those who learn by lesson, teaches bad habits. Defaultifying strictures will not change that.

Even if use strict; was to be the default from now on, most novices will still end up having to unlearn bad habits, because we have a huge legacy of bad habits in the wider Perl culture. Some of it is even built right into Perl — just look at all the globals that control I/O behaviour. This can't all just change overnight.

I understand your concern and I certainly do wish we could teach everyone good practice right off the bat, so they would make both their own and our lives easier. But to think that just enabling strictures by default is all that this will take is vastly oversimplifying the matter. And that legacy gives us an unfortunate and unwelcome but nevertheless very real reason not to default to strictures.

Sometimes, reality just bites.

Here's hoping that the community's rewrite of the community will improve matters.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re^3: Why isn't C<use strict> the default? by Aristotle
in thread Why isn't C<use strict> the default? by BrowserUk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.