[pseufaux]

It's a bit like when non-JS programmers complain about JavaScript. It's mostly nonsense. That's not to say that JavaScript doesn't have flaws and footguns, but the opinion of novices in the language is not who I am interested in learning from. Python is the same. It has flaws and idiosyncrasies, especially in the standard library (cough cough xml.ElementTree), but the core language is fairly consistent and predictable. Expecting casting functions like bool() to parse strings like JavaScript does makes little sense.