A "walk a mile in another's compiler" argument?
I still say that being programmer-friendly is more important than being compiler-friendly.
However, a hobby test project does not have that luxury, and may have to bend toward keeping the compiler/interpreter simple at the expense of some syntactical niceties.
IOW, you are comparing the standards for apples to the standards for orangees.
If the early draft for PHB had dollar signs, that would not bother me because I would not use it at that stage. But BY NOW those fricken dollars should be long gone (except for embedding variables in strings, where they make sense).
