What's the purpose of the sigils now? When I first learned Perl, I assumed they served some function I didn't quite understand. They contained context information not conveyed
by the braces or brackets in the expression. But the new ones seem like gratuitous ornaments. They seem redundant.
What I like about Perl is that it's designed for fairly experienced/capable programmers instead of being optimized for complete beginners (P4E). Even in Ruby you have to keep typing "end" all the time. Yuck. I've sort of held out hope that Perl6 might take back the scripting-language market for programmers who don't need so much hand holding, but I wouldn't mind getting rid of any unnecessary historical cruft.
--Dan