Article author here.

To be clear, this is not a tutorial on writing good, idiomatic Perl. (And, I've strengthened the article's disclaimers to that emphasize that.)

It's a semantic excavation of Perl.

My goal was to understand how the Perl interpreter thinks, and to answer language design questions like: How are parameters passed--by value, by alias, by name, by reference, by need? How are variables scoped--lexically, dynamically, globally? What is the effect of @ in a prototype? For the .. operator, how is the implicit toggle scoped--at the procedure or the nearest enclosing block? How do prototypes influence context, and how do contexts influence evaluation?

That is, I wanted to understand what was possible. The possible is entirely separate from the good.

As a formal semanticist, I was continually surprised by how Perl behaved.

As someone that has had to occasionally debug other people's Perl, I believe there is value in understanding the syntactic and semantic quirks in the language.

Thanks for your comments.

I'll be updating the article with your feedback.