Agree whole-heartedly that strict should be on by default. A few people who use Perl only for sysadmin scripting might complain they had to type 'no strict' at the top of every program, but these people are in the minority now.

When I first started coding in Perl, i never use'd scrict (mainly because I didn't know it existed). Once I'd developed a whole lot of bad habits (like never using 'my'), it took a long time for me to break them. I think this is something that causes a lot of people to decide not to use strict - it seems like a big learning curve when you've already been using Perl without issue for years...

Backwards compatability issues could be solved... it's only going to affect people who upgrade their Perl version.. if they do that on a system that has important stuff on it, they should RTFM, and see that they have to set such and such environment variable to turn off strict, or update all their code.

In my company, Perl is seen as a lower level in the food chain than other languages (even ASP), and it's mainly because most people don't use strict. Even if they do, they don't realise the importance of it. I think Perl would be taken a lot more seriously as an application language if use strict was the default.