I disagree that a simpler grammar makes it easier.
And comparing to perl is amusing. That is famously a write only language. Easy to build quick text processing in, but about it.
For older code, this is a point I give to lisp. Not only can I still read most older code, I can still run it.
The claim was: Python was easy for beginners. Certainly a simpler, more consistent grammar is easier for beginners.
For me, I left Perl for exactly that reason. Python just seemed to "fit in my head" much more easily than Perl. Scalar vs List context is a PITA.
> For one, complexity of language says little about complexity of programs made in language.
True. But I can also tell you that I could come back to my Python code a couple months later and still understand it. That never happened with my Perl code.
And, this really got put to the test when Python code I wrote 15 years ago came back home to roost. Yeah, I cringed at some of the ways I did things in the code (although probably I should be kinder to my younger self--it was Python 1 code chewing through nasty binary formats), but I could still understand it and debug it.