A generous interpretation would be that the OP meant "edgy" as in definition 2a from Webster's[1]:

being on edge : tense, irritable

In other words-- GP recounted a memory of tense, anxious feelings about working with Perl.

OP was unwittingly made edgy by reading this and anthropomorphized Perl to express said feelings of tension and anxiety back to GP.

Seems plausible to me.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/edgy

It started around two decades ago, but I would say the "use strict if at all possible or you're doing it wrong" consensus was reached at least as long ago as 2005, being conservative. Because backwards compatibility was always seen as paramount, it never became default, but if you opted into new version features by version number[1], those advanced to enabled both new features and to turn off or warn on use of what were considered problematic features in the code. For example, a "use v5.10;" pragma would warn indirect method syntax with the assumption you never wanted that (so any new Foo("arg"); would error, so people would use Foo->new("arg"); as the sane agreed upon way it should be done), and would disable bareword filehandles (so you would need to assign them to a scalar like $FH instead of FH).

use v5.12 and later also automatically enabled strict. Perl 5.10 was released in late 2007, and 5.12 in 2010, so there was enough consensus over a decade ago to add it as the default for anyone opting into the bundle of all newer Perl features.

1: https://perldoc.perl.org/feature#FEATURE-BUNDLES

I've been using it as long as I can remember.

I'm a -wall kinda guy.