Sigils are underappreciated (2022)
I like to rate programming language&#x27;s features not by how much I use them when I&#x27;m in the given language, or how good they make me feel, but by how much I miss them when I&#x27;m in a different language, once I&#x27;m fluent in that language and writing in the native idiom. (This is important. If you&#x27;re still trying to write X in Y, yes, you&#x27;ll miss the features from X, but that&#x27;s not a useful data point.)<p>By this metric, rather a lot of features turn out to be less important than they may seem at first. Many things are a zero on this scale that I think might surprise people still on their second or third language. From this perspective you start judging not whether a language has this or that exact feature that is a solution to a problem that you are used to, but whether it has a solution at all, and how good it is on its own terms.<p>So while sigils have a lot of company in this, they are also a flat zero for me on this scale. Never ever missed them. I did a decade+ of Perl as my main language, so it&#x27;s not for lack of exposure.<p>(As an example of something that does pass this test: Closures. Hard to use anything lacking them, though as this seems to be a popular opinion nowadays, almost everything has them. But I&#x27;m old enough to remember them being a controversial feature. Also, at this point, static types. Despite my decades of dynamic typed languages, I hate going back to dynamic languages anymore. YMMV.)