I don't hate it, but I hate it's growing popularity. It is the little things, for example functions like len() that should really not be standalone but belong to string or array or whatever (I am not that deep into python). Or the the crippled lambda.
To me it is roughly equivalent to JavaScript - both have some syntactic sugar that the other doesn't have. But JavaScript has full power lambda and is overall much more elegant in my opinion (in the sense of needing less concepts to achieve more - basically it is all hash maps and functions).
Perhaps CoffeeScript is the solution, haven't really tried it...
I understand the frustration with the crippled lambda. But with regard to len() and other global functions that seemingly belong as methods on string/array/etc. -- it's worth reading Armin Ronacher's post on the rationale behind that:
To me it is roughly equivalent to JavaScript - both have some syntactic sugar that the other doesn't have. But JavaScript has full power lambda and is overall much more elegant in my opinion (in the sense of needing less concepts to achieve more - basically it is all hash maps and functions).
Perhaps CoffeeScript is the solution, haven't really tried it...