[hugs]

Yes, it's the type glyphs. (For me, at least.) Back when I was a DBA writing database back-up scripts in Perl, I could never remember how to dereference a value in an array or hash properly. (It reminded me of my problem with pointer notation syntax in C). When I first saw Python, I thought "Wow, it's like Perl, but without the confusing notation." I rewrote the scripts in Python and never looked back.

[raiph]

> I could never remember how to dereference a value in an array or hash properly.

I too struggled with that and came to hate it.

Perl 6 directly addressed this and some related problems.

First, sigils are now invariant - they're just a part of the name that signals which of the three data structure types a particular variable is. Second, there's no need for a `->` dereferencing op.

  my @array = 1,2,3; # `@` sigil means indexable var
  say @array[1]; # prints 2

It might be interesting to look at an example. Perhaps you could share an example of code in Python that illustrates some data structuring code that would be confusing in Perl 5 syntax, I'll try show what the Perl 6 equivalent would be, and we can see if Perl 6 really does clean this part of the language up.

[collyw]

Nested arrays are a pain on the arse in Python. Do I use extend or append? Then strings are treated as character arrays. I far preferred Perl's approach where you would reference or dereference variables instead.