So one of perl's nicest features is it just plain, flat gets out of your way. If you want to write something some way, go ahead, perl will allow you.
This is great - you can cook something up in 5 lines that would take 15+ in Python and 50+ in C++. It also means that it's really tempting for some to abuse this ability, even for code which will be long lived.
I'm not sure I understand how that answers my question. Are you suggesting that Python doesn't get out of your way and that somehow its intransigence provides the benefit of somehow forcing people to write more readable code?
I don't believe Python is that inflexible (it's not), and I don't see how the limited and superficial ways in which Python pushes all code to look the same are really that meaningful.
This is great - you can cook something up in 5 lines that would take 15+ in Python and 50+ in C++. It also means that it's really tempting for some to abuse this ability, even for code which will be long lived.