Having programmed similar stuff in Perl 4 (pre-strict), I have to disagree; dorking around trying to find the place you misspelled a variable name is a pain in the anatomy. Let the computer show me the dumb mistakes; having to type three more characters to explicitly scope a variable definitely doesn't double my development time, and it definitely halves or quarters my "Why the ^&#$ did it do that?" time.

Less screwing around with easily-detectable errors means more time for developing fun stuff and blithering on Twitter and Perlmonks. So "yay" for strict, for me.