>>111i agree with you that people arguing about FIOC (or really any similar syntactic complaints) have no idea about actual language design or use
what are the "messy" semantics of list comprehensions?
why is self a thing? to reference the current object? if you mean why is explicit self a thing, it's because explicit is better than implicit
global is a thing because more often you are going to be declaring local variables with the same name as global variables than you are going to be reassigning global variables. furthermore it discourages use of global variables to keep mutable state
again, pass being explicit is good for the sake of being explicit, plus it is easier to read "while spinning: pass" than it is "while spinning:"
one of your complaints is colons? seriously?
dynamic typing is not a valid complaint against a language, it's your personal preference
python's benefits are large and comprehensive static libraries, easily readable code, and the ability to directly use low-level procedures and structures in high level code.
i'm not saying python is a perfect language, just that your complaints are ridiculously stupid. here are some valid complaints:
lack of tco
cpython
handling of strings (e.g. 'c'[0][0][0][0][0] == 'c')
comparisons with None and booleans being int (this might have been fixed in 3.x+?)