> I'm talking about what Perl itself does (with the use of `$ARGV`, `@ARGV`, and `ARGV`
I suspect that's a combination of Perl's influence from awk (@ARGV), wanting something easier than awk's ARGIND for the current index in ARGV, and wanting to try out some of these new features Perl had in the beginning. I also suspect that things like this may be on the list of things Larry regrets about early Perl choices. I believe he's on record as saying he regrets the choice of sigil variance for array/hash and array/hash access (@foo as $foo[0] instead of something like @foo[0]). He's got good reasoning for why he chose what he did (based on language, it makes sense), but it's just overly confusing for beginners.
> although maybe `$_` and `@_` is a better illustration
I'm willing to give them a special case, because they are unique, as variables go (well, less so than they should be given Perl's many magic variables, but I think you understand my point). That said, I don't think many Perl programmers would argue that @_ was a better choice than @ARGUMENTS, or something equivalent.
As for assuming the docs in general reflect the current best practices.. I'll just note that the perlopentut man page still uses bare filehandles in the majority of its examples, and to my mind that was decided long ago as a community to be downplayed in favor of lexical filehandles (but for more practical reasons than what we are discussing, bare filehandles are globally scoped).
> chromatic is an excellent programmer, and I certainly respect his voice on Perl over, say, mine, but I feel that he is rather strict
I'm not going to argue with that. I respect chromatic's opinions on style and Perl 5, but I'm not entirely sure he's capable of being entirely objective with Perl 6 yet (which I can understand). He is rather adamant about what he believes are better approaches to a topic.
> I do not take his opinions as necessarily representing those of the larger Perl community, as exemplified, among many others, by Wall, tchrist, Conway, and/or merlin.
Fair enough, but I wasn't sourcing that believe from Modern Perl, just pointing to it as evidence. To be honest, I haven't read Modern Perl (but I've read a lot of chromatic's writing from his blog back in the day when he was writing it), I just assumed it might have something to back up my view, so looked in it. My view on variable naming here is perfectly capable of being more my own opinion that the community, and I was projecting. It's hard to know in Perl unless there's a discussion (and sometimes even after that), as what's acceptable is often a mostly overlapping set of best practices from person to person, but rarely are the sets of preferences entirely equivalent. :)
That said, Conway's Perl Best Practices suggests "Name arrays in the plural and hashes in the singular." It doesn't address our topic directly, but I don't know where my copy went (I sourced that from one of the many two page reference PDFs for PBP) and I don't recall the reasoning he used for that one. I wouldn't fault you for disagreeing with him though, I've shifted my view on some of his suggestions over the year towards or away from his suggestions (notably not using parens on built-ins, but I'm more in-line with his thinking now than I was a decade ago).