Ever since starting to clean up some of my ~/bin to be Perl::Critic compliant I've found that I make more syntax errors and my code is harder to read. I suppose those two go together. There seem to be a small number of rules like ' ' -> q that seem designed just to make things difficult to parse. My tool progression went from having automatic syntax checks to automatic lint checks to automatic Perl::Critic tests. The transition away from things that actually compile the source started letting me leave dumb syntax bugs in my code. Bummer.

I was already in a sweet spot where I only ever saved syntactically correct things. I might have other bugs but at least I'd always pass perl's compilation.

I figure I'm going to have to either make P::C do Lint as well (which happens to include a syntax check) or uh... I dunno. Something. I figure having P::C + Lint is the best of both worlds because that's really P::C + Lint + Syntax. The only problem I have with Lint right now is that I haven't written in pragmas to disable it's checks in contexts where they're inappropriate.