I still don't understand that revulsion. Yeah, it looks "ugly", maybe (a valid but very subjective opinion), but it also makes it obvious that something is a variable and - specifically - whether that variable is singular or plural at a given moment.
The "Perl is indistinguishable from line noise" meme came about from folks equating JAPH-style Perl Golf one-liners with all of Perl. It had very little to do with the use of sigils specifically; such "line noise" is perfectly possible in Ruby and Python.
If anything specific to Perl contributed to the "Perl is line noise" meme, it's probably the fact that a bunch of special variables have names consisting of punctuation marks. Nothing stopping the programmer from doing a "use English;", though.
The "Perl is indistinguishable from line noise" meme came about from folks equating JAPH-style Perl Golf one-liners with all of Perl. It had very little to do with the use of sigils specifically; such "line noise" is perfectly possible in Ruby and Python.
If anything specific to Perl contributed to the "Perl is line noise" meme, it's probably the fact that a bunch of special variables have names consisting of punctuation marks. Nothing stopping the programmer from doing a "use English;", though.