Amen. This is my credo.
I had to program Python in my last job and I ran as fast as I could from that world of artificial limitation, and landed squarely in the land of camels and onions: The Promised Land.
> I can't understand how someone open minded enough to be cool with Perl and it's [sic] strangeness, would be upset by something as trivial as whitespace.
Thank you for the compliment of open-mindedness. Every language is strange to some degree until one becomes proficient. Notice your own grammatical error above. English too is strange until one masters it. But we won't blame people for making mistakes because bad code can be written in any language.
Whitespace is not trivial in Python. It has been promoted to logical operator.
Now everything that I type gets broken unless I use an editor to protect me. Oh, you might say, any modern editor should be capable! This leads to IDE dependence like Eclipse and PyCharm (both written in... Java).
There is none of this nonsense with Perl. I work on systems of every size with the simplest, most robust set of tools. I don't need a complex baseline just to write my code.
> It obviously isn't that much of a problem as it's one of the most popular languages ever and used [...] from children to Google's chief scientist [..] critical backbone of many companies [..] defacto language to build an API for.
C, C++, Java, Javascript and Bash are also very popular languages. The first three are more important that Python. And they are all unlike Python. Google has formally sponsored Python for some time, which certainly helps Python. Google has also been developing Go, which is itself a better language than Python in many ways. And Go solves the problem of formatting for readability in a sane way (go fmt).
An API can be expressed in many ways.
> It's fine to find it aesthetically displeasing
The above criticisms are objective.
However, I don't like how many lines idiomatic Python requires because of the whitespace promotion. At its best, Python allows clear, compact expressions such as lambdas.
At worst, Python is needlessly puffed with emptiness. Perl is as compact as the coder wishes it to be. It is easy to run perltidy and colourise the output for a formatted view if one prefers.
I don't think anyone would compare Python to C or Java. C is good for microcontrollers and drivers (that sort of thing), while Java is good for large enterprise systems. Python on the other hand is an excellent scripting language. Much more popular than perl by the numbers where nearly all scripting, data science (well, R too), and ML is used. Every application I've seen in the last decade has had a Python API, but none use a Perl. I've literally never heard of a Python developer switching to Perl, but I've lost count of the number of folks switching to Python from Perl over the years (HN threads). Simply speaking, the numbers show that the faults of Python (there are many) are still less than those of Perl (also many). As far as whitespace goes, it means it's easy for all Python coders to read each other's code once you adjust for a spacing difference. No need to run something like "perltidy". I've never once needed a fancy editor like eclipse. I've used the little Tk editor IDLE, Spyder, just notepad ++, and Vim + Command Line just fine over the past decade, just like how I've used Perl.
All in all, they're both great languages with several warts. Google isn't replacing Python with Go. Their uses are very different. Obviously Go makes for a more performant backend, but requires significantly more code, so there is a trade off. I would bet that Python and Perl have a pretty similar amount of semantic density (or whatever it is called). Saying it is puffy nothingness makes little sense. Just something like iterating through a file is pretty much the same in both languages. The use of lambdas was discouraged by Python's creator as it means more stuff for developers to learn and keep in their head. Larry Wall's TIMTOWDI means that the developer gets more power, but there are 10 different ways to do something and a lot of folks REALLY don't like that as it makes maintenance and learning more challenging.
I hope the tone didn't come off as condescending or too argumentative. I was just doing my best to essentially say that all software stinks in it's own way (including both Python & Perl). The few times I've reached for Perl over the years, it has worked fine. Some of the issues such as having a fairly primitive OO system out of the box without reaching for Moo or Moose on CPAN are more than addressed with the very advanced Raku (formerly Perl6), but at this point, that's a perl inspired sister language and not a viable upgrade path.
I will argue that it isn't primitive, but that it is composable and as lean as you want it to be. If I want a dict with just two methods, I can build it easily and with small memory usage. (This is important when scaling objects into the hundreds of thousands... or more!)
TBH, Perl5 OO is easy and tractable. I would agree that the "bless" artefact is unusual, but it does make sense from the point of view of C structs.
Oh, as far as REPLs go, there are some easy solutions for Perl, from trivial to more complex. Python's REPL is limited because it doesn't handle multi-line structures well. That is in part a consequence of using whitespace as a logical operator.
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).
This discussion was amusing to read, but I have to butt in days late. Go will not devour any interpreted language without an available interpreter of its own.
I see a world where /usr/bin/perl will become PID1 and at every system boot will
mv /usr/bin/python /dev/null