I don't much like it either. Came from C++, learned Perl, got a job writing Fortran, learned Lisp. When hating on Perl came into vogue on the internet, I said

I don't much like it either. Came from C++, learned Perl, got a job writing Fortran, learned Lisp. When hating on Perl came into vogue on the internet, I said to myself, okay, I will learn Python as a Perl replacement. It is a decent Perl replacement, what with all the libraries and the fact that it is shebang-able. Now that I've dispensed with background, what I don't like about Python: 1. Assignments don't return values. I hate this. An example. I would like to write: if (m = re.match("woo, regular expression")): do some stuff with match object Instead m = re.match("woo, regular expression") if m: do some stuff with match object This obscures the fact that I only care about this match object if it evaluates to true. 2. List comprehensions kind of suck. [(a, b) for a in as for b in bs] is a cartesian product and not a zip? Really? 3. Loops don't help this either: There's no equivalent of the Lisp (loop for x in xs for y in ys do (stuff x y)). I have to explicitly loop over the index. This pisses me off. 4. I feel that I am generally shoehorned into creating and assigning more objects than I would like. Honestly it seems kinda crippled in comparison to Lisp, which, by the way, runs faster. I would go back to Perl if multidimensional arrays were not so godawful. Perhaps I should try Ruby.