There isn’t really any magic in Perl, just lots of unfamiliar lexicon if you come from more traditional programming languages. Perls problem is it’s history is rooted in command line usage so there’s a tonne of inherited reserved single character variable names and such like that are optimised for keystrokes rather than readability. However you can certainly write Perl programs that don’t follow those older conventions and look more like a modern language.
That kind of magic in Perl has a different kind of meaning than "magic number/bool/string parsing" in YAML.
Perl tied-variable magic just means there are (effectively) getter and setter properties attached to the variable. "Magic" is just the name that was chosen in the implementation, and it stuck.
It's used to implement variables with special, automatic meanings, like $$ for "current pid" and $! for "last error".
It's also used to implement variables with user-defined behaviours on access, which is quite handy for a lot of abstractions.
A lot of modern languages support both of these things, because they are useful, but it's not called magic in those languages, it's called something like "watchers", "proxies", "getters and setters" or "hooks".
No, the criticism of YAML-style "magic" is that it leads to entirely surprising behaviour from innocuous input. Perl magic is not that kind. If you're using a special variable, you already know why.
That’s just playing around with the same reserved variables I spoke of before and there is nothing magical about them aside their silly name. In fact the opposite is true, they’re actually predictable and well documented. They just happen to have terse names as a throwback to command line usage (eg you wouldn’t call $1 a magic variable in Bash because it happens to work the same as ARGV[1]).
In fact in Perl, you can opt for longer, readable, lexicon over the terse single character variables; and that’s literally how modern Perl should be written.
Whereas the problems described with YAML is where it can automatically alter your data based on what the parser “thinks” the data should represent. Which is generally what people mean when they talk about “magic” in IT: systems that don’t honour your input and instead automatically convert it into something else. Perl doesn’t do this even in spite of it looking like executable line noise to many.
