As a sysadmin (I seem to be saying that a lot thesedays), I've seen uncaught exceptions on some genuinely insignificant errors. Plus, since they are written for programmers, the error messages are mostly useless for sysadmins. If error messages aren't going to be useful for users or sysadmins, I question their usefulness in production code.

I agree with the 'know if error occurred', but I'd argue that showing it to the user should be the last ditch desperation response, not the default fallback. I found this with smalltalk, which would throw me a popup window for any uncaught exception - as if anyone is going to use a system like that!

Please do write your article up. The highest quality articles I've seen on Perlmonks have been by authors who have been annoyed beyond endurance by a 'feature' of perl, or a community shortfall. Well thought out critiscism of perl is a staple here.