I wrote this article almost a year ago as part of an omnibus reply to a bunch of different posts from a perl5-porters thread. I never finished all parts of the reply and thus never sent this part either, but in contrast to the other parts of this stillborn mail, I think this one is worth reading. So asked Johan Vromans:

It still escapes me why @* was chosen instead of the much more logical []:

$h{a}[0]->[]

The reason is that there are a number of problems to solve with any new deref syntax:

Buddy Burden:

Yes, we had multiple keynotes [at YAPC::NA 2014]. Two or three a day, even. I thought that was a bit weird. My friend David Hand kept joking that we had gone beyond keynotes and were now into keychords.