If your code only works properly without strict, wasn't your code already broken? And broken by design?

that! (*points at you*) is the attitude that disgusted me so much from the announcements. SawyerX, is that you? LOL

Wow. I don't know if it's still true today, but back when Perl was actually popular there were 1,000 "single-screen scripts" out in the wild for every CPAN module or application framework. And, emphatically and forever, I say it's silly to call those broken by design, or bad code, just because they didn't put unnecessary constraints on themselves.

Anonymous, I script everything. Bash, sed, perl, python, lua, pwsh, and tons of others (but never once in awk, true fact). I write scripts that write scripts so I can script while I'm scripting. And I am here to bring you the good news that there is a wide wide spectrum of scripting tasks out there, and one size does not fit all.

So sure, when you get past that one-screen level of script, you start to care more about misspelling a variable, and you don't mind spending a couple lines of code making sure $3 isn't undef before you splice it into a string. Probably 2/3rds of my perl scripts are strict+warnings, and factored into modules, and all that. But, Anonymous Monk, listen to me now and hear me later: the single screen, non-mission-critical, just-lives-in-my-$HOME scripting... the -p scripting where $cnt++ comes out of nowhere but totally has your back when you need the count at the END, is some of the best scripting there is. That's the 20-minutes of scripting that does the next 8 hours of your job while you browse XKCD. Don't miss out on that scripting, Anonymous.

Broken? ...like a fox!