I liked that quite a bit, but the structure has been bothering me, like with most other solutions: it feels to me like the failure case gets too much emphasis. I didn't know how to do any better when I first saw the post, though. But now I think I do:

{
    my $try = first { $hash{ $_ } } @options;
    defined $try or ( log_failure(), last );
    do_something( $try );
}
[download]