As somebody who spent some years writing Perl code, I don't feel that having a few well-defined ASCII symbols were such an issue. The problems with Perl are tha

As somebody who spent some years writing Perl code, I don't feel that having a few well-defined ASCII symbols were such an issue. The problems with Perl are that symbols change depending on the context (eg, an array @items needs to be accessed via $items[$i] to get an item at position $i, to tell Perl it is a scalar context), and weak typing. Even with changing symbols, it makes it easier to distinguish between scalars, arrays and hashes, especially with syntax highlighting. As opposed to languages like Haskell or Scala, in which library designers are free to display their creativity with such immediately obvious operators as '$$+-'. Edited to add that I agree with your overall point. Shorter is not always clearer. It can be a benefit to have a few Unicode symbols displayed via 'conceal' but it's not (at least in my experience) a major productivity gain. And the number needs to be kept small. If I want Unicode symbol soup, I'll play a roguelike.