Absolutely the right stance to take.

A rare example of curly-brace-madness being useful comes from lovely web APIs provided by big names (here's looking at you Google and Yahoo!) which provide JSON-formatted responses containing identifiers like foo$bar or foo:bar which when converted directly to stdClass properties (via json_decode) cannot be accessed with the normal syntax (e.g. $object->foo$bar), calling for something like $object->{'foo$bar'} instead.

As for actual variables names, I can't think of the last time that I used the ${...} syntax for production code outside of a double-quoted string; I'm uncertain if it has ever happened.

How about you keep this kind of stuff to yourself, next time? Thanks.