alt Hacker NewsI felt the same way about moving to Python versus PHP and Perl.
I still really enjoy using python though. It's not really a fair comparison because I hadn't used PHP and Perl for as long but I just don't hit some mystifying issue every single session like I did with those languages when I'm using python. I honestly have never even read about that __debug__ constant. It's fun to hear about it but it's just not something that's comes up much.
Perl is a lot like that also, you can read about some really weird old features like $[ but you never see that in practice, you just write code with variables and functions and so on.