There are a lot of devil's advocates against Perl out there who advocate things like java instead and most Perl programmers will be forced to work in a team with such people at some time in one's career.

One hears all kinds of criticisms, most of which are untrue.

Unfortunately, one common criticism, about the readability of Perl variables, seems difficult to defend other than by saying "you get used to it quickly enough".

But messy comment syntax is just masochism when defending Perl and this in my mind tends to filter out many possible ways.

My favourite of the above has got to be ACME::Comment which will make it much easier to justify using Perl in a multidisciplinary human environment - the C++ multiline syntax is identical to that of java and many more languages.

Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.