It's really not that different; you just end up declaring your input arguments one line lower than in most other languages. Not a big deal in practice.

And with @_, you're free to use positional arguments, named arguments, variable arity, etc. without penalty. Some languages only give you some of that.

Yes, that sucks. It's not much extra typing:

def function(x, y, z):

versus

sub function { my ($x, $y, $x) = @_; }

The overhead is only really the 'my = @_;' chars, but it is annoying. On the other hand, it does allow you to do things like partially unpack args and pass the rest as a bundle to a super class.

You can partially unpack in Python too:

  def method(self, *args):
    a, b = args[:2]
    super(self).method(*args[:2])

Perl's lack of using the definition for the variables doesn't necessarily make it 'more powerful.'

Python's approach is very reasonable. Both Perl and Python are nicer than C varargs.

Most of your life's problems can be solved at CPAN. :-) Just write:

  use Method::Signatures::Simple;

http://search.cpan.org/~rhesa/Method-Signatures-Simple-1.02/...

But you might instead want to look at this (or similar with Moose support) to get simple type declarations:

http://search.cpan.org/~barefoot/Method-Signatures-20120523/...