Your article mentions alot of Perl finepoints, for which all have a best practices, for instance you write:

Consider another example :

open( my $FILEHANDLE, '<', 'myfile.txt' );
$a=<$FILEHANDLE>; 

#<> returns just one line

open( my $FILEHANDLE, '<', 'myfile.txt' );
@a=<$FILEHANDLE>; 

#<> returns the whole file contents

the diamond operator returns different values depending on the context
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So what? Thats a handy tool to have in the hands of an experienced programmer. So what do YOU think of Perl's automatic type handling? As a fairly long time user, I can say it makes programming alot easier, rather than being forced to make casts and lines of empty prototype specifications.

Now it does slow processing, to have the program itself, determine variable types, but when you need speed, you can always reach for C or Fortran. ( and call it from Perl thru IPC :-) )