[handrous]

Beware that it was created at a time when many programs were written in plain text editors, with no syntax highlighting or autocompletion, with the printed-book language manual on your desk, on a screen that could legibly display only a small fraction of the text that a modern display can (or even ones that came along a few years later). Hence: sigils for variables (though unlike PHP these make some sense and are actually used to do things, and aren't just there because... well, because Perl did it, so PHP should too, I guess); single-character magical variables for very commonly-used loop- or input-related variables; et c.

I don't think anyone would make something quite like it these days, starting form scratch.