Thanks for your reply. I think your tone was fine. But you went a little astray.
We
were just talking about whitespace being promoted to logical operator, which was your interesting psychological point. Now you have unpacked your full set of criticisms. (o:
A couple of things attract additional comment from me:
> With perl you have to add all sorts of junk like "use strict;" and "use warnings;"
You named two things, and you call them junk. Maybe you don't recognise that these statements do toggle functionality in a useful way. Perl can be used effectively as a piped-command language. Perl's notation makes it terse and powerful.
> I don't think anyone would compare Python to C or Java.
But you made an argument from popularity. If popularity is to be taken as a rational, enlightened movement, other very important languages have converged on different notation from Python. (If we are still talking about notation and whitespace.) Python's notation is not the most popular, as much as its evangelists insist. Add Go lang to the bigger group as well.
I think Go will devour all the interpreted languages eventually.
> data science (well, R too)
Yes, in this field (data science may be a marketable construct), C++, SQL, R, Python, and Jupyter play the major role. Other languages may offer more in the future. Folks talk about Julia, for example. Perl's PDL has not been adopted as widely. Of course, once you have data, you can science it with any fast, robust tooling. I often use awk and Perl too.
Do you dislike awk and sed as well? I find that common among Python programmers.
> they're both great languages with several warts.
No language made by monkeys is going to be "perfect". Go fmt and perltidy make more sense than building an ecosystem for a personal preference. We both know that bad code can be written in any language.
I use both languages daily. Python has a better threading story despite the GIL. But I can find better tools that don't have Anaconda-size dependencies. (I cannot easily summarise my contempt for pip).