Ah, back in university I wrote a paper comparing Perl, Python and Tcl/Tk.

Tcl was by far the easiest to use, while Perl sat on the other end of the spectrum for both skill needed to write it as well as to just be able to read it.

As the mantra goes, "Power, but at what cost?!?"

Modern python is far more complicated than anything one saw in a perl 5 script back into the day. Type hints, decorators everywhere, big frameworks like numpy that force your problem into particular paradigms. The modern focus on async and iterables has had the effect of turning even simple code "inside out". It's complicated!

And what's interesting is that it's complicated in a lot of similar ways, in terms of thought space, as perl was. Perl was great because you could be clever, where you really couldn't in more pedestrian languages.

I find (and I'm not sure this is a good thing) that my python output these days feels very clever sometimes...