[giantrobot]

> I never liked Python much, until I got forced to use it on a new team. Now I'm convinced that it has a really distinct advantage -- there aren't too many ways to write Python, so an experienced Python developer can figure out code pretty quickly.

This is why I picked up Python many years ago. I had been using Perl 5 for my scripting and system administration needs. While it worked just fine any project larger than a few hundred lines needed a lot of discipline to keep maintainable. Perl encouraged too many line noise shortcuts, reading unfamiliar code was too often an exercise in looking up uncommon operators.

It's elegant when writing but frustrating when reading. Python not only read a bit more like it executed but didn't lend itself to unreadable shortcuts. If your code is elegant to write it tends to be straightforward to read.

When Perl 6 was still Perl 6 the DSL stuff sounded interesting until like you I realized it would just turn large projects into unreadable messes. It wouldn't help the small Perl scripts be more readable nor would it help the large projects be more maintainable.

[MadWombat]

"It's elegant when writing but frustrating when reading"

As a person who used to use Perl 5 rather extensively back in the day for all sorts of things, I fondly remember the joke that Perl is a "write-only language" :)

[giantrobot]

I'd joke about Perl 5 being write-only until I had to go read my own code from only months prior. I would get so mad at myself for making it so hard to follow but then for expediency I'd go and do the same damn thing in the current batch of code. Then months later curse myself. I've opened Perl files that I swear had bitrot but nope, not corruption, just a bunch of sigils and weird operators.

[agumonkey]

beware, when reading django faux-metaclass based declarative ORM it feels not very far from a bad DSL. In the end you have no clue about what's what or the meaning of things.