[bonzini]

You can learn Python, PHP and (a bit less) Ruby without ever touching a book, and definitely you can skip over the first chapter if you're an experienced programmer.

There must be a reason why they made sigils more "traditional" in Perl 6, for example.

> People who gave up on perl because of that... really would not have survived the rest of the course anyway?

I didn't give up on it, I just didn't feel the need to stick with it. I switched to something else that required less of a context switch when going back, awk or jq or Python.

Now, jq is something that throws me off every time I use it. But it's a completely different processing model, whereas lists and hashes are not specific to Perl.

[creer]

> I just didn't feel the need to stick with it.

So, to touch on that, no contest that for a while now, you can have a well paying job only writing python. (And perhaps even never going through a formal course on it.) That has worked for many people.

> There must be a reason why they made sigils more "traditional" in Perl 6, for example.

Eh. Sigils are even more present / visible in perl 6. And other compact notation devices. All the way to making up your own unicode-based line noise when it serves. Which it does.

[bonzini]

Yes, I didn't say that sigils went away. But for example in Perl 6 lists are @ whether you declare or access them, instead of the sigil changing depending on what you want to get out of the expressions. It says it in one of the first apocalypses even that people "found it a bit weird": https://metacpan.org/release/AUTRIJUS/Perl6-Bible-0.30/view/...