You really haven't read much Steve Yegge have you? He has his gripes (some of which have been recanted, mind), but he explicitly states he likes Python.
I find it unfair to invoke Steve Yegge too often, since he's just a guy with an opinion. I have read a fair amount of his rants, of varying quality. His language comparative analysis is interesting because it is informed, argumented and ...well, funny. Read this passage, for example:
>Well, they're just like the Smalltalk folks, who waited forever to replace C++, and then Java came along and screwed them royally, and permanently. Oops. Ruby's doing exactly that to Python, right now, today. Practically overnight.
He just points out at some major architectural flaws in Python (like the scoping issues leading to selfSelfself and unreadable code, and then the whitespace...) and argues that Ruby has superseded both Perl and Python in many ways. That does not mean he does not LIKE Python. His is just an engineer's analysis, not an emotional judgement.
offtopic:
I -- on the other hand -- am emotionally scarred by Python having tried to take it into my system over a couple of years and having failed to love it. Then Ruby came along... ;)
>Python's author, Guido Van Rossum, also made some boneheaded technical blunders early on — none quite as extravagant as Larry's blunders, but a few were real doozies nonetheless. For instance, Python originally had no lexical scoping. But it didn't have dynamic scoping either, and dynamic scoping may have its share of problems, but it at least sort of works. Python had NOTHING except for global and local (function) scope, so even though it had a "real" OO system, classes couldn't even access their own damned instance variables. You have to pass a "self" parameter to EVERY instance method and then get to your instance data by accessing it through self. So everything in Python is self, selfself, selfselfself, selfSELFselfSELF__SELF__, and it drives you frigging nuts, even if you don't mind the whitespace thing.
Thanks. I read the page and I still don't get it. You might use self.my_function() or self.my_variable. When would you see selfSelfself? Or is Yegge being a poet here?
I'd say you're far from the truth.