I think it's entirely a matter of personal taste. I also try to avoid the ampersand whenever possible, using parenthesis after its name (empty if there are no arguments) to make it clear that it's a function call.

There is at least one case, though, in which the ampersand has a very specific use: if you write "&func" (this is, with ampersand and without parenthesis) the function will be called with the contents of @_ as arguments. I don't know where this is documented; I learned it from Conway's OO-perl book.

Other uses for the ampersand include de-referencing code references.

--ZZamboni