It is pretty similar to Hungarian notation, but it also denotes context. But is it half-assed? I'm not sure. It expresses the type of the variable over a very narrow set of types. If anything you could say that the type system is half-assed. I've thought a lot about this over the years and I have come to believe that it is really a minimal type set that offers an incredibly useful set of abstractions.

For me, the main advantages of sigils are that I can immediately see if I am looking at a variable or a function name and that the sigil effectively separates the name spaces between functions and variables. This has the side effect of making it easy to distinguish functions that have been passed in as variables from functions declared or imported into the particular scope.

Even with a nice IDE I miss the distinction that the sigils provide.