Don't use C-style return code checking in Perl then; use autodie.
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. :)
For what it's worth, Perl 6 has much, much better default behavior.