Well, he notes in the linked talk that "use strict;" and "use warnings;" will be the default in Perl 6. The fact that your goal is to Huffman encode the language design doesn't mean you'll always succeed. Things change over time. Initially, 15 or so years ago when Perl 5 came out, use strict was a new idea and rarely used. Over time the culture encouraged people to use it pretty much always. The Huffman encoding was right at first, but usage has changed. Changing the language to reflect currently usage is hard if you want to preserve backward compatibility, though.
Fine, but what about error handling? It's been known for quite some time that C-style return code checking is a fail. And it certainly makings coding a lot more verbose. There are lots and lots of situations where doing something in perl is just a lot more wordy than other languages that are better about "Huffman encoding".
Ok, but it's still more work than if throwing an exception were simply the default.
And this is just one example. I programmed perl for the better part of a decade and every day I felt the pain of how "anti-Huffman encoded" it is unless you're making 3 line scripts. If perl people wish to concede that this is all perl is good for then I'll happily concede that perl does indeed have good Huffman encoding. :)
