alt Hacker NewsYou can't do that if you gave up at the very first sigil puzzle.
I'm fine with that: to program in Perl you need to be able to follow manuals, man pages, expert answers, - and even perl cookbooks, or CPAN or web searches. It's a technical tool. The swiss army chainsaw. It's worth it.
Seems like you and a few other posters are making the article's point – that Perl's culture is hermetic and that new programmers would rather learn Python, Ruby or Javascript rather than figure out which sigil means what.