Although the Ruby example may look cryptic at first, it is easily decyphered. To someone that is familiar with Ruby syntax and functions, the variables would be obvious. The prefix in Perl is particularly helpful in knowing what are variables and what aren't, although if they are named clearly they would be noticed as variables regardless of the prefix. PHP's method could be more confusing for a Perl programmer, to whom it would seem odd that hashes and arrays aren't prefixed properly, over a C programmer, who would just see it as all variables get a prefix. Personally, I like how Perl does it, but that could just be because I use Perl.