Except that <> isn't just <STDIN>, it reads from each line of each file specified as an argument on the command line or STDIN if no files were specified. This dual use (and magical-ness) is why I shy away from it in actual programs (but it is useful for one liners, which is why it does this), as it can be confusing.

Some people will look at this as evidence that Perl should be relegated to one-liners, but I find immense usefulness in combining my more engineered aspects with one-liners, and providing myself with a "project evaluator". What I do is create a simple bash script which just calls perl and sets the library include path to the project lib, includes a few useful things to always have (Path::Tiny, Try::Tiny, Data::Dumper, etc), and passed the rest of the args to Perl. Using DBIx::Class for SQL manipulation and/or using complex API client libraries I've written combined with the abilities of perl to do things easily as a one-liner is amazing.

<> is actually <ARGV>. And actually the least cryptic spelling IMO is "readline(*ARGV)" or just bare readline, which still compiles to the same opcodes. Sure, <> is more common, but it's easier to find what readline and ARGV mean.