You can quote all the "facts" you want, but I've done a lot of both Python and Perl, and it's a lot easier to walk cold into a bunch of Python code, even badly

You can quote all the "facts" you want, but I've done a lot of both Python and Perl, and it's a lot easier to walk cold into a bunch of Python code, even badly written Python. What you call "superficially more visually similar", I call consistency. If I have to use conscious thought to figure out the structure of the code, it's taking from the conscious thought I need to understand its function. And yes, Perl is even more powerful than Ruby when it comes to making code compact, but compactness and eloquence are two different things.