I used to work in a company that programmed entirely in Forth. Yes it was a long time ago. In Forth there were not any types at all. And zero error checking. Forth tended also to be extremely terse. On account of that everybody who wrote Forth code very soon developed their own private dialect...which no other Forth programmer anywhere could easily read.

That situation is doubtless contributory to very few people even having ever heard of Forth today. Yet I do remember a certain liveliness of freedom those lack of restrictions afforded. And I remember enjoying them. Perl's own inbuilt freedoms were a large measure of what lured me to it originally. I shouldn't enjoy to see them trimmed too severely back. That would be saddening, I think.

I did have a rather short affair with Perl Critic. It did not much inspire me to run out and buy the book from which it cites most of its rules. At first I tried to take all its advice. And the results to me looked hideous. Having started out in Forth, I find Perl's flexibility, broad as it is, refeshingly restrained. But I shouldn't want it any tigher. I just do not see the point of having to do "if (bar) {foo}" always in favor of "foo if bar" for no better reason than to prevent C++ folks from being shocked by it.

My current fling is with a new book entitled Higher Order Perl which promotes the idea of functional programming in Perl. The first two chapters alone are worth the price of the book. The section on using dispatch tables has done more to make my code more readable than Perl Critic was able to do, I rather tend to think.