The various "best practices" dogmata you seem to decry have evolved in the Perl community because Perl gives the programmer a lot of freedom--to screw up or to do magic for good or evil.
Other languages focus on technical restraints to prevent bad programming. Perl relies on cultural norms.
Whether this is a feature or a bug is open for discussion.
For some reason, you seem to be against the use of strictures and warnings (but, maybe I am misreading your posts and you only oppose blind dogma). These pragmata do an excellent job of catching d'oh type errors. Misspelled a variable? Used it out of scope? Typed if( $foo = 3 ). Warnings and strictures just saved you time, potentially hours. So, to my mind, they are particularly appropriate to mention in this thread.
If you don't see a use for strictures and warnings, try hacking some PHP for a while. If you type as badly as I do, anything over a few hundred lines will start to hurt.
Update: I'm happy to be wrong. The use of strictures is important, and I am very glad to see that you agree--especially glad to see that you say "almost all" your code.
The core disagreement here is whether it is appropriate to apply this advice in this thread. I think it is, you think otherwise. No big deal.
You are absolutely right to mention the other 254 practices in PBP. (Although not all of them should be followed--which is a topic that has been thoroughly debated.) PBP was my first thought on reading the OP--but someone else had already posted a pointer to it.
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