It does work, but you'll find that there is a very widespread rule among Perl users which is "Do not use grep or map in a void context". Often the argument is that it is because it uses extra memory for nothing. But Perl is smart enough and turning all uses of grep and map in a void context into a simple for loop could work fine. The problem, as MidLifeXis already said, is not that they don't do it right, is that it's not what they mean.
A for loop on the contrary was made for this kind of things. And the postfix version is even shorter than a grep or map in this case $sum+=$_ for @array;
