Python always felt well designed to me. Slow yes but it felt the the author really thought about how the language would go together. This is mainly a comparison to the other scripting languages available.

Pick your poison

  shell  #expand all the strings, but those pipes are nice, why can't more languages have pipes.
  awk    #not a bad language, but very very small, and an AWKward(see what I did there) implied data loop
  perl   #can do anything but the syntax is, well it is a real frankenstein monster of a syntax
  python #well designed syntax, has a strange block structure but at least it is always nicely formatted
  tcl    #all the strings! but other than that not half bad
  ruby   #pretty, but wow, that is a lot of magic
  php    #just graft on whatever to the language as you need it, don't worry about how it all fits together.