lambdas in Python are a particularly weak aspect of the language; I will readily agree with that. But overall Python is pretty multi-paradigm. In addition to the object-oriented features that are more well-known there are several standard modules that assist with functional programming: functools, itertools and operator. There's third-party stuff, too, but I haven't really looked into it.

Perl strict is useful. I seem to remember always using both strict and warnings for anything other than one-liners in a pipeline. But it's much like ES6 strict in that the core language tends to be kind of lax and this needs to be addressed. It's not an issue all languages have.

I don't know what CPAN as a package system per se is like these days. I will say that it annoys me when pip, the de facto Python package manager, overrides packages that are a part of the Ubuntu repository that get regular updates, because pip doesn't do automatic updates, but I don't know if that would be an issue with CPAN now.

Re: code appearance, I never minded that Python requires very regular indentation. It's something everyone should do. But you may be right about code smells being more apparent if this structure is not required.

I appreciate that CPAN remains very active and alive given the relatively diminished size of the Perl user base. That's a good thing. Unfortunately, for the purposes of machine learning, which is something I am very interested and involved in, it's not really there.