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.