I don't. Much of their arguments are legitimate, if you care about the things they complain about.

Perl *is* a large, complex language; that's a statement of fact, not opinion. I once counted over 200 function call formats in perlfunc; that's a lot for the base language. What's more, each function call can be called in one of three contexts: and lots of people don't understand context right away. You have to memorize each function twice; what it does in scalar context, and what it does in list context, and if they are different or not.

Perl does a lot automatically, in a lot of different situations, and until you memorize what shortcuts perl is taking, you won't know what it's really doing. Even experts here on perlmonks run code through B:Deparse to try to make sense of what's really happening with strange code.

Seems like I committed the mortal sin of indenting the code with a tab instead of eight spaces. You see, Python uses indents to tell it which lines belong to which blocks of code instead of using curly brackets. A "feature" according to Python people. I haven't touched it since.

Every language has it's "rookie mistakes". A long time ago, when I was first trying to learn perl, I wasted several hours trying to figure out why a simple pattern match wouldn't work. Turned out I was using ~= where I should have been using =~ : I'd never used composite operators before, and kept reading over the typo. I nearly gave up on Perl then, too.

Python's forced indentation has a purpose; it eliminates indentation errors (which can be annoying to track down on your own), and it ensures that your code is indented in a readable format.

I've wasted a lot of time over the years, in C and in Perl, running a search for a {, % match it, try to figure out if that's what it should match, decide it is, go on to the next match, iterate. I've actually started commenting end braces whenever I have to maintain code; not only does it give a bit more explanation as to what an ugly off-screen construct seems to do, it helps me resolve the painful "does this brace match what it should match?" question. Looking back on those wasted hours over the years, a little "use tabs for indentation" rule just doesn't bother me that much.

It also neatly solves another problem; pretty printing. If some wingnut formatted Perl inconsistantly (2 column indent half the time, 4 the next, 8 the next), you've got to parse the entire language just to indent the code. Perltidy does a good job with a horribly complicated language ("only perl can Parse perl"), but it didn't exist for years, and took a long time to write.

With tab indents, you just change the size of a tabstop. A ten year old can write a "tab to space" converter.

Perl's philsophy is just different than Python's. Perl people tend to focus on initial code development: the perl motto is "there's More than One Way to Do it". Python people tend to focus on maintainance -- something more like "There's One Right Way to Do It: strive to find it".

Depending on whether your do more coding or more maintenance, you may prefer one over the other...