As mentioned by GrandFather, Python embraces a "The One True Way" philosophy of programming whereas Perl is very much more TIMTOWTDI. One result of this difference is that a lot of Pythonistas seem to extend that into a "The One True Language" outlook, where Perl users seem to extend TIMTOWTDI to language choice as well. As for Ruby-- nice language, but it seems to suffer from "fanboys will be fanboys".

FWIW, I've seen crap in both Perl and Python. Just because Python uses whitespace as syntax (ick) doesn't prevent people from writing pythonic line noise.

W.R.T. Object oriented being the (one true) way forward-- if this is so true then how does that explain the current hype surrounding functional languages like Erlang, Clojure, and Scala (o.k. that last one is object-functional)?