&gt; The only thing I do not like about this is that in Python strings are also iterables.<p>This touches on a big pet peeve of mine, and coincides with some ranting I was doing on the Scala Native post the other day. :)<p>Languages that support coercion should try to make sure they don&#x27;t overload <i>core</i> operators for different types of operations for different core types.  E.g. &#x27;+&#x27; for numerical addition and string concatenation (one is commutative, the other is not, and if you decide on which action to take depending the order of variables, that&#x27;s confusing), or ==&#x2F;!= for string equivalence and numerical equivalence (10.0 and 10 are numerically equivalent, but for strings we generally want an exact match).<p>Having an iterating operation work on a string without any preparation is one of those things that seems simple and useful, but likely causes a lot of confusion in dynamic languages in practice because you lose track of exactly what it&#x27;s possible a variable can hold because it&#x27;s often dependent on the return value of someone else&#x27;s function.  I imagine exposing a method on strings that returned an iterable interface, and requiring that be the method you iterate over a string, would reduce that confusion quite a bit.<p>&gt; I ought to learn Perl, because that&#x27;s pretty cool.<p>I think it&#x27;s worth picking up the core concepts for anyone, because there&#x27;s a few concepts (e.g. context) it implements as core parts of the language that are still rarely used elsewhere.  Unfortunately, its hybrid beginnings mean that you can largely miss the importance of things like context early on because the code looks enough like what you are used to that you assume it works the exact same way, and 95% of the time that&#x27;s true.  The other 5% will leave you scratching your head and wonder why Perl seems so stupid or inconsistent, when really your mental model is wrong.  List and scalar context and how they apply to the core types should be the first learning item on a new Perl programmer&#x27;s list if they know another C-like language.