Your honor the jury rules on the following counts.

clearer, more concise syntax

Charges not proved. Clearer != more concise sysntax. As has been mentioned many times with regard to sigils, a core perl design object was that different types of things should look different so as to reduce confusion

a shorter path to producing autogenerating documentation

Not proved. I wrote a simple but effective tool to add pod to an arbitray module class and it only took me an hour. But thats cause I used one of the most sophisticated regex engines there is: Perl.

having to only worry about, maybe, 4-5 different styles to maintain vs. 20

Not proved your honor. Complaints like this are redundant in the face of autoindenters like Emacs and PerlTidy. Does Python have a tidier?

far fewer rules to remember

Irrelevant. Try doing complicated things with simple tools and the result is convoluted.

Yves / DeMerphq
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Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.