[ytinas]

Fine, but what about error handling? It's been known for quite some time that C-style return code checking is a fail. And it certainly makings coding a lot more verbose. There are lots and lots of situations where doing something in perl is just a lot more wordy than other languages that are better about "Huffman encoding".

[chromatic]

Don't use C-style return code checking in Perl then; use autodie.

[ytinas]

Ok, but it's still more work than if throwing an exception were simply the default.

And this is just one example. I programmed perl for the better part of a decade and every day I felt the pain of how "anti-Huffman encoded" it is unless you're making 3 line scripts. If perl people wish to concede that this is all perl is good for then I'll happily concede that perl does indeed have good Huffman encoding. :)

[chromatic]

I agree that Perl 5 has some of the wrong defaults. It's a sore point for some people.

For what it's worth, Perl 6 has much, much better default behavior.