[Sammi]

There's is no fair comparison to be made here with how + and * work is most languages, precisely because + and * work the same in most languages, while whatever perl is doing here is just idiosyncratic.

Even C gets it's fair share of flack for how it overloads * to mean three different things! (multiplication, pointer declaration, and dereference)

[totallykvothe]

The original statement wasn't that the sigils are unconventional. They are. It was that they were "subtle". They are not.