SWToolsmith

This is just a side effect of being the first popular scripting language. While Perl was being used by anyone & everyone to get stuff done, people who desired a more formalized and strict object-oriented structure migrated to Python. Non-programmers and get-it-done types hacked together Perl since the notion of objects (let alone subroutines) was beyond their ability. It's natural Python scripts are easier to read, since they tend to be written by more professional programmers.

Now that Python has eclipsed Perl's popularity, it's just a matter of time before you start seeing the same level of quality issues in Python. The untrained, non-programmers will be creating write-only scripts in the new language soon enough.

It was just a few months ago that I debugged some Python scripts for a QA department at a smallish company. This code was the equivalent of any nightmare that I've seen in Perl. Not only was it all very "un-Pythonic", it didn't use classes, it hardly used subroutines, and it was equal parts of commented out tries along with the "working" code. The gem was a script that wrote another Python script and executed it (written because the author only knew how to initialize multidimensional arrays, but didn't know how to build them on-the-fly).

(And yes, there were popular scripting languages before Perl. I remember arguing the superiority of Bourne shell scripts of C-shell scripts...)

Perhaps we can retire the notion of "write-only" Perl -- all languages of sufficient complexity provide the means to obfuscate.