[jlokier]

Perl is a surprisingly Lisp-like language, due to its very consistent approach to closures and statements-as-expressions. Its approach to references, which are reference-counted and have RAII with predictable destructors, is also very clean. I think most people don't notice that Perl is a cleaner and more consistent language in depth than it appears on the surface.

Criticisms of Perl often talk about the sigils and other punctuation characters which appear in normal Perl code, implying that's a big issue, or at least rather old-fashioned. (Although I really like Perl and got to know it intimately, especially the guts of the interpreter, I did feel it would have fared better without the sigils.)

That might be a fair criticism by modern standards, but if so, it annoys me that Perl gets singled out for punctuation while other popular languages don't. PHP has sigils everywhere, and many languages have some sigils. Rust has quite a lot of special punctuation syntax that has to be written often. Aside from sigils, Rust code looks to me like it has a similar amount of punctuation-oriented syntax as most of the Perl code I used to write.