In Perl, people make a game out of doing as much in a single line as possible.
Wrong. It's not 1995 anymore.
Experts do things that are mystifying to a beginner.
And this is a Perl thing? What I've found from listening to beginners is that they accuse every programmer of intentionally mistifying them. OO is too hard. Macros are too hard. Monads are too hard.
Unfortunately, the experienced programmers use these features because there is a significant productivity advantage in doing so. They don't use the features to intentionally confuse beginners. The good news is that the beginners can use these features too, as soon as they are willing to admit that maybe the experts aren't actually out to subtly screw them over.
In Python, an expert would be expected to produce a solution that is comprehensible to a less-expert programmer, spanning however many lines as are necessary. It would be un-Pythonic to write code that a less expert programmer couldn't understand.
I don't think you get that cultures differ, or that Perl one-liners capture something about the Perl culture. There's nothing wrong with the Perl culture, and the Perl language is well-suited to it. It's certainly different from the Python culture. Not only that, the "Python culture" in the sense of people who write about and influence Python is not synonymous with Python programmers, not by a long shot. Programmers are different -- "programmers are programmers" only if you define programmers fairly narrowly as professional programmers who measure their worth by their ability to use programming languages in the most elegant and powerful way possible.
Among software developers, Python programmers are of course keen to demonstrate that Python is just as awesome as other languages. That isn't really the point of Python, though. Python's value was never in how it served people who could afford to devote a lot of time to mastering it. You wouldn't judge a Prius by how fast Michael Schumacher could drive it around a track, would you?
There is a whole population of programmers out there who really don't give a damn about programming languages and who rightly don't invest a lot of time in mastering programming. They exist, they do important work, and Python's ability to serve them is important -- that's the bottom line and the truth, even if this audience isn't eager to hear it. People like that are sensitive to the difference between Ruby and Python, and they've mostly never seen decorators.
Wrong. It's not 1995 anymore.
Experts do things that are mystifying to a beginner.
And this is a Perl thing? What I've found from listening to beginners is that they accuse every programmer of intentionally mistifying them. OO is too hard. Macros are too hard. Monads are too hard.
Unfortunately, the experienced programmers use these features because there is a significant productivity advantage in doing so. They don't use the features to intentionally confuse beginners. The good news is that the beginners can use these features too, as soon as they are willing to admit that maybe the experts aren't actually out to subtly screw them over.
In Python, an expert would be expected to produce a solution that is comprehensible to a less-expert programmer, spanning however many lines as are necessary. It would be un-Pythonic to write code that a less expert programmer couldn't understand.
<picture of lolcat>.