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I don't know why you're being downvoted. It's the truth. Back in the 90s many of us invested hundreds of hours mastering Perl and post 2008 ended up using Python/Ruby/etc more frequently for various reasons and now speaking for myself I can barely decipher a line of Perl. It's syntax is extremely hard to maintain in memory when you stop using it.

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if people leave perl because of the syntax then a perl renaissance was not going to stop that. the change that had a chance to make the syntax more attractive was perl 6/raku.

Example?

For me, it was the argument passing syntax. I had to look up the magic sigil for doing hashref stuff every single time.

One day I tried Python, learned that everything is passed by object reference, and set Perl aside and never looked back. There was so much less mental overhead that Perl never lured me back.

There was an experimental auto-deref feature since Perl 5.14 And it's already gone again since 5.24.

That's because it didn't work reliably. There were at least a couple of situations where Perl would have had to guess which operation you were trying to perform, so the feature was a source of potential bugs.

Hi. I really liked your book Modern Perl. Yes unfortunately auto-deref had problems.

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