What “$_%@" means for the love of god?
(You could imagine at a stretch those characters as part of an unrealistic expression, like "print $_%@array" meaning "print the value of $_ modulo the length of @array", but you can write messy code without spaces like that in many languages.)
I used to think heavy criticism of Perl's use of punctuation characters were valid, until I looked at PHP, Ruby and Rust, and realised that some of the more popular and even loved languages are punctuation-heavy too. I prefer languages with less punctuation (despite doing expert level Perl), so I think the use of sigils ($variable) is not the best design space, but I think the criticisms of that kind which single out Perl are more like a have-a-go meme than a level-headed comparison by now.
The mandatory dollar sign in variable names looks dumb in php, I grant you that. As well as the dot for string concatenation. But perl insists on the distinction between $variable, @variable, and %variable; which is just wild. How is it that python works fine without all that noise, for chrissake? Or javascript?
You would prefer *ref like in C? You can actually do that (it's a GLOB type).
The place people get tripped up is that $scalar can be a string, or a ref.
You check that easily with ref $scalar eq 'ARRAY' or whatever guard you want.
> but you can write messy code without spaces like that in many languages
I think it's fair to say that Perl forces these extra hoops more than any other language.