Perl hacker who tried to switch to Ruby before adopting Python here:
Of _course_ boring is better. How could it not be? If you are trying to solve a problem, the last thing you want to be thinking about is the language itself.
The language you adopt to code up a solution should force you to think clearly, but no more than that. Executable pseudocode is as close to an ideal state as you can get for a high-level language.
Perl, meanwhile, was filled with multiple ways to do things -- famously and absurdly thought of as a virtue -- reveled in side effects, and did so much implicit work with variables and flow that perl was often unreadable by anybody else, including the you of three months from now.
"Python did everything other scripting languages did, but in a cleaner and more comprehensible way" tells you most of what you need to know about Python's victory, but the death blow was delivered by the perl community's love of complexity, which led to the disaster that was Raku.
By the turn of the century, it was clear that python 3 was a better plan for the future than perl 6.
Of _course_ boring is better. How could it not be? If you are trying to solve a problem, the last thing you want to be thinking about is the language itself.
The language you adopt to code up a solution should force you to think clearly, but no more than that. Executable pseudocode is as close to an ideal state as you can get for a high-level language.
Perl, meanwhile, was filled with multiple ways to do things -- famously and absurdly thought of as a virtue -- reveled in side effects, and did so much implicit work with variables and flow that perl was often unreadable by anybody else, including the you of three months from now.
"Python did everything other scripting languages did, but in a cleaner and more comprehensible way" tells you most of what you need to know about Python's victory, but the death blow was delivered by the perl community's love of complexity, which led to the disaster that was Raku.
By the turn of the century, it was clear that python 3 was a better plan for the future than perl 6.