And the claim about how Perl behaves and is to be programmed in is totally, completely wrong.
For the start, one couldn't even write a correct "if" condition in Perl without knowing if it's about numbers or strings. Even if the comparison is over the "scalars."
Second, the numbers not only exist, one can control which numbers are used when (one can explicitly force integer underlying types for some expressions or code blocks, or keep the floating point calculation, or even turn on infinite integers).
Third, Perl has scalars, arrays, hashes, references, which have even different symbols throughout:
so the types are more obvious when reading the language lines, much more than any language where every use of the variable looks almost the same.
That's why it looks "too much like line noise" to those who don't know the meaning of the symbols. But having these symbols makes the code somehow "firmer" -- the programmer must much more often write what is expected from some variable, and the expected behavior is more obvious when reading.
For the start, one couldn't even write a correct "if" condition in Perl without knowing if it's about numbers or strings. Even if the comparison is over the "scalars."
Second, the numbers not only exist, one can control which numbers are used when (one can explicitly force integer underlying types for some expressions or code blocks, or keep the floating point calculation, or even turn on infinite integers).
Third, Perl has scalars, arrays, hashes, references, which have even different symbols throughout:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil_(computer_programming)
so the types are more obvious when reading the language lines, much more than any language where every use of the variable looks almost the same.
That's why it looks "too much like line noise" to those who don't know the meaning of the symbols. But having these symbols makes the code somehow "firmer" -- the programmer must much more often write what is expected from some variable, and the expected behavior is more obvious when reading.