When I first came to Perl, I was annoyed by the sigils because I would always forget to use them when naming variables. However, I quickly came to understand how very useful it is to be able to identify the sort of value you're looking at in a glance. The only similar method is the so-called Hungarian notation, which is unwieldy and ugly (IMNSHO, anyway). Now I wonder how I ever got along without the sigils. They make coding and debugging so much simpler.