I'm no fan of Perl, but you can use $OUTPUT_AUTOFLUSH instead if you "use English;". So this isn't really a Perl language thing; it's a style thing. Other languages can be made to look really bad with poor style. The question then becomes what is culturally accepted, and what is not.
The problem is that nobody ever tells you these things, the documentation doesn’t cover them and as a result everyone still uses the terrible original syntax.
