I was hoping you'd come by. Welcome to the Monastery.

This is 100x better. Well-done. Variable names can be improved, but I can actually scan this code and understand the basic intent. The biggest improvement now would be to skip intermediate variables that only exist once. So, something like: 

use strict;
use warnings FATAL => 'all';

use List::Utils qw( sum );

my $input = do {
    local $/;
    <>;
};

my %letters;
$letters{$_}++ for grep /\w/, split //, $input;

my $total = sum values %letters;

for ( sort keys %letters ) {
    printf "%s\t%d\t%.3f\n", $_, $letters{$_}, $letters{$_}/$total;
}

print "$total characters\n";

[download]
The big differences there are: This would be considered more "perlish". Remember - readablity also includes conciseness. This is why well-written Java is less readable than well-written Perl.
My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

In reply to Re^5: Golf: Improve this guy's fail . . . please! by dragonchild
in thread Golf: Improve this guy's fail . . . please! by dragonchild

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