You can learn Python, PHP and (a bit less) Ruby without ever touching a book, and definitely you can skip over the first chapter if you're an experienced programmer.

There must be a reason why they made sigils more "traditional" in Perl 6, for example.

> People who gave up on perl because of that... really would not have survived the rest of the course anyway?

I didn't give up on it, I just didn't feel the need to stick with it. I switched to something else that required less of a context switch when going back, awk or jq or Python.

Now, jq is something that throws me off every time I use it. But it's a completely different processing model, whereas lists and hashes are not specific to Perl.

> I just didn't feel the need to stick with it.

So, to touch on that, no contest that for a while now, you can have a well paying job only writing python. (And perhaps even never going through a formal course on it.) That has worked for many people.

> There must be a reason why they made sigils more "traditional" in Perl 6, for example.

Eh. Sigils are even more present / visible in perl 6. And other compact notation devices. All the way to making up your own unicode-based line noise when it serves. Which it does.