Perl takes a pragmatic take on this (as well as other takes...) with the collection of ::Tiny CPAN modules that just do one thing pretty OK. Things like Try::Tiny that help immensely with exception handling - something you don't want to really roll you own.

It itself does not have any dependencies that aren't in core:

http://deps.cpantesters.org/?module=Try%3A%3ATiny;perl=lates...