I spent a while in Perl and tend to agree, I was the only one in my group who went out of his way to write readable/maintainable code. Everyone else believed in extreme code ownership and enjoyed playing "golf".
I've never coded in Python, but spent a little time in Ruby and liked how they knew you could do things many different ways, so the community and leadership focused on identifying and promoting idioms. I think that's a key factor in adoption. Perl had some of that (and the excellent "Effective Perl" had a chapter on it), but you need to make it part of your culture.
> so the community and leadership focused on identifying and promoting idioms. I think that's a key factor in adoption. Perl had some of that (and the excellent "Effective Perl" had a chapter on it), but you need to make it part of your culture.
Yes it does need to be part of your culture. And there is no reason for a Perl team/shop not to because best practise idioms are heavily preached [1] and baked into [2] Perl and its community.
I've never coded in Python, but spent a little time in Ruby and liked how they knew you could do things many different ways, so the community and leadership focused on identifying and promoting idioms. I think that's a key factor in adoption. Perl had some of that (and the excellent "Effective Perl" had a chapter on it), but you need to make it part of your culture.