That certainly doesn't solve the problem of other people showboating their knowledge of obscure Perl sigils by using those ridiculous line-noise abbreviations in code you're trying to use and understand, so you have to look up each bit of obscure punctuation in its particular context in order to understand the code.

If hard-to-read-and-remember syntax exists, people WILL use it. And some people will make a POINT to use it, because it makes them feel cool.

Having two totally but pointlessly different syntaxes for the same thing doesn't absolve you from having to learn both syntaxes, because you'll still encounter other people's code that uses both of them -- it just gives you twice as much syntax to learn.

If there's a "sensible alternative", then why does there have to be a "senseless alternative" in the first place?