You know Perl gets hassled because of the variable sigils, but when I've taught Perl to newcomers it didn't seem to be much on an issue. Maybe this is because Modern Perl tends to be more clean and OO, there's not the sigil busyness you might see in old Perl code used by admins in the mid 1990's. I think this is really just something people that use other languages are bothered by. I know we all have preferences. When I do Javascript I tend to miss the sigils a bit :)