Perl sigils are horrible; perl magical variables are horrible, perl lack of sane object and argument passing is horrible. (Moose was improvement but slow, if I remember well.) It's a language of cludges on top of other cludges.
I guess it became popular because it existed and there was nothing better (nobody will write in awk if not pressed to).
We don't need badly designed tools to stay humble. There is enough cognitive load from all the bad programmers (and now LLMs spewing slop), no need to add another nonsense.
I admit though that writing perl makes you feel "clever" - "huh that's a funny shortcut I didn't know! Writing $\<>^^ will give me name of last used file on blue moon on thursday!" but... uh.
> I admit though that writing perl makes you feel "clever" - "huh that's a funny shortcut I didn't know! Writing $\<>^^ will give me name of last used file on blue moon on thursday!" but... uh.
I write Perl and I hate this mindset a lot. A LOT. Some people get excited and feel like they are megawizards of the White Council because they can line up all their sigils and make them dance, and thus feel just that little bit superior. There's nothing superior about maintaining a program where to change it, you need to solve puzzles three, make the change, and wrap it in another puzzle for the next guy.
I know that feeling of being a wizard, and I used to have that smug expression on my face, too. But now I'm over 40, and I'm jumping from one place to another in a magical codebase to debug it, and I can't help but feel like if it was just that little bit less magical, I could have fixed it and be done with it quite a while ago already.