> The decline of Perl's mindshare for new domains was totally separate from "sigils".
When you quoted someone saying "how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked" and said "the conspicuous reasons seem to be a combination of: 1) PERL's usage of sigils," I took that to mean you were saying that sigils were a major reason that Perl isn't well-liked by as many people anymore. I'm sorry if that was a misunderstanding.
> Because special non-obvious symbols that "don't explain themselves" are perceived as terse.
The Merriam-Webster definition of 'terse' is 'using few words: devoid of superfluity.' It is not a synonym for noisy. 'my @list' is terser than 'List<T> list,' but both are wordier than better-liked-than-Perl languages like Python, Ruby, and Javascript, which is where Perl's mindshare went (I've been taking that last part as a given). I'm not claiming Perl isn't terse, I'm just saying that it was nonsensical to say that 'PERL's usage of sigils [...] makes code compact and terse.' Compared to C#, sure, but Perl was never competing with C#, and most of the mindshare it used to have didn't go to C#, so it's not really relevant. If the extra terseness (not noisiness) afforded by using sigils was a major reason for Perl's unpopularity, then Python, Ruby, and Javascript's popularity is very strange.
print while (<>);
Is definitely terser than
for line in fileinput.input():
print(line)
But you'll notice there aren't even any sigils in the Perl version.
Sigils being ugly and Perl being too terse might both be problems it has, but they're different issues.
When you quoted someone saying "how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked" and said "the conspicuous reasons seem to be a combination of: 1) PERL's usage of sigils," I took that to mean you were saying that sigils were a major reason that Perl isn't well-liked by as many people anymore. I'm sorry if that was a misunderstanding.
> Because special non-obvious symbols that "don't explain themselves" are perceived as terse.
The Merriam-Webster definition of 'terse' is 'using few words: devoid of superfluity.' It is not a synonym for noisy. 'my @list' is terser than 'List<T> list,' but both are wordier than better-liked-than-Perl languages like Python, Ruby, and Javascript, which is where Perl's mindshare went (I've been taking that last part as a given). I'm not claiming Perl isn't terse, I'm just saying that it was nonsensical to say that 'PERL's usage of sigils [...] makes code compact and terse.' Compared to C#, sure, but Perl was never competing with C#, and most of the mindshare it used to have didn't go to C#, so it's not really relevant. If the extra terseness (not noisiness) afforded by using sigils was a major reason for Perl's unpopularity, then Python, Ruby, and Javascript's popularity is very strange.
Is definitely terser than But you'll notice there aren't even any sigils in the Perl version.Sigils being ugly and Perl being too terse might both be problems it has, but they're different issues.