zlacker

I'm familiar with those sigils from various places. Me on my childhood C64: "What does 'B dollar sign' mean?". It just boggles my mind that someone writing a brand new programming language would use them when there were English-like alternatives (like `my foo = keys barHash`). It was sometimes hard to remember what [sigil][name] was going to if you didn't already remember what [name]'s, erm, inherent type?, was. Like is $foo going to give me the string that was already in $foo, or perhaps the number of (occupied buckets)/(total buckets) if $foo is really a hash?

I was able to reason my way through these things and had luck writing reasonably large Perl programs. It did absolutely zero to help make devs' lives easier, though.

>>kstrau+(OP)
In 1987, when your audience of bash and awk and sed users was looking for a language to bring those together and were familiar with them... why wouldn't you use them?

I would also contend that given the tools at the time (vt100 terminals without syntax highlighting being prevalent systems) sigils made it easier to write more on a line, provided easier visual recognition (for those familiar with the language) about the syntax, and provided for a more easily written lexer.