in reply to The Most Essential Perl Development Tools Today
Perl::Critic
Would you submit to having your code reviewed by a committed of Java theoreticians?
Because that is exactly what you are doing by submitting yourself to PerlCritic.
Fully 95% of Perl::Critic's (and by implication PBP) justifictions are as puerile as banning ball games from school playgrounds because participants might skin their knees.
Making their own mistakes and learning from them is how kids learn. Banning every construct and idiom, that might under some obscure circumstances cause the occasional program to fail, is like trying to wrap your kids in cotton wool. Overindulgent, counter-productive and ultimately futile.
Like the boy that cried wolf; perlcritic prematurely bellyaches at the merest hint of a possibility of trouble. And in the process, renders programmers that obey it, to a set of rule-driven automatons that never gain experience; lack any kind of innovation; and ultimately never acquire the programmer's greatest attribute: common sense.
Many will say (have said) that perlcritic is "only advisory". The problem is that unless you have acquired the experience of when the particular constructs and idioms that it decries voluminously with artificial & fictional reasoning, are useful & not; dangerous & not; perfectly acceptable despite their dangers, & not; you will never have the knowledge upon which to reject its advice. Or not.
Perlcritic is the thin end of the wedge to the de-skilling(*) of the programmer's art. Reject it. JUST SAY NO!
(*Look up that word. Learn from the history that underlies it. Remember the old fart's of today were yesterday's youth. And do not deceive yourself into thinking that the youth of today know anything; think anything; or try anything that their forebears didn't know, think or try 20 years before them. Those that ignore history are bound to repeat it.)