And I'll disagree, but just a little.

There are mechanical I-should-probably-always-do-this things that Perl::Critic can check for:

• Did you use strict and warnings?
• Did you remember to use 3-arg open?

And several other things that Perlmonks repeatedly urges people to do that are on the mechanical side, meaning that they are simply "did I remember to do this or not?" questions that are not syntactically or semantically invalid, but are reasonable standards to enforce on your code. If the requirement to do something is mechanical, then making the check to see that it is done mechanical is reasonably well-advised.

I do not currently run Perl::Critic against our codebase, but I can see that there are some - some - checks that might be useful - the "did I remember" ones. I do completely agree with BrowserUK that running all of the checks and just doing everything it says to do is very much the wrong way to go, mostly because you're abdicating your own judgement and knowledge of the code to something that does not actually understand the code at all.

Used as a to-do list specifically for what you want to remember to do, and adapted to your particular needs, Perl::Critic is pretty useful. Otherwise, it's like a to-do list that includes the things that someone else has decided people Should Do.

Metaphorically speaking, if you have a busy 20-something single woman living in Brooklyn and a forgetful 80-something man living in rural Arizona, the Brooklynite doesn't need a reminder to shake scorpions out of her shoes, but it might be critical for the Arizonan. Perl::Critic by default reminds you to be careful not to be mugged for your phone, but has no idea that scorpions even exist.

(Okay, to stretch the metaphor, it's actually warning you to not be mugged for your Walkman because it's never heard of cellphones.)

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