Ok, twigils, whatever. They're next to each other so they're double the crazyness. Like the $#last_index in Perl. In Raku the . and ! are used to designate a private or public variable within a class definition. I got it backwards, which sort of proves the whole point. Push a private array nested into another and you have a bunch of gibberish worse than in Perl, where you'd only prefix it with \. Use an auxilliary variable and it feels too verbose. OTOH @{$hash{array_ref}} dereferentiation in Perl is quite annoying. And no, $hash{array_ref}->@ is definitely not how you fix this mess. I agree that sigils offer some insight into what type of the variable you are looking at.

Great improvements are not enough compared to other languages, even Ruby which is quite slow itself. Have you wrote anything in Node, Dart or Lua? They feel like a F1 car where Raku is an 17th century cart.