IMHO academics prefer axiomatic systems where a limited set of rules can be applied to derive the rest. Your colleagues can be lazy b/c other academics prepared the modules.

Maybe I don't know Python enough to tell, but it has this appeal ... while Perl is a pile of DWIM magic exceptions, which are fun for experienced coders who don't wanna miss their features from other languages (bash, sed, awk, c, lisp, ...) but do confuse many Asperger folks who only accept "one way to do it".

Ruby OTOH shows that it is possible to transport rich semantics into a more orthogonal syntax, by breaking compatibility to Perl5.

Should be noted that P5 never really broke compatibility to P4, thus giving it an incredible amount of obscure features and exception rules.

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