[TheDauthi]

When using Perl you should `use strict; use warnings;` and you have something approaching a real language with a lot fewer warts, in which said quine is not a valid program. It isn't the default because Perl people have an obsession about not breaking backwards compatibility.

I think the people that love perl love its expressiveness. It has a little bit of functional programming here, and a system for making an object-oriented language, and all of these handy tools and you choose which ones you need or find most readable. I've heard Ruby called a better Perl, and - as someone whose day job is largely those two things - that's completely fair.

[smueller1234]

Many moons ago, I made a case for making strict mode the default in Perl. We settled on the current backwards compatibility compromise, which is that breaking changes are hidden behind a minimum version toggle:

Eg. putting "use v5.14.0;" or similar on top of your file (or compilation unit/scope) will indeed turn on strict mode for you, along with adding a number of features as well.

At the time, also auto-toggling warnings was considered unacceptable because technically, using the warnings pragma anywhere had some edge case action at a distance. This has been remedied in some later release after I wasn't involved in the language development anymore, and from some more recent version, warnings are also part of the standard import.

I imagine you (TheDauthi) already know that, though.