Your "obvious" rules are as arbitrary as those of any other language.
What is the difference between a tuple and a list that's "obvious" to a novice programmer? (Yes, you may claim that I change my argument to talk about lists versus tuples, but if you want to press on this line of thinking, Python's syntax for list and list-of-list declaration is the same as Perl's syntax for anonymous array declaration.)
Which parts of the requirement for a trailing comma after the first element of a single-element tuple are "obvious" to a novice programmer?
Which of those "obvious" rules are obvious cognates with other programming languages?
(What's "obvious" about Smalltalk having a strict left-to-right evaluation order, ignoring "obvious" mathematical precedence rules which schoolchildren learn?)
> ... in Perl, you've got the same expression that creates a list in one case, but not in the other...
This is still not true. The comma operator creates lists in Perl.
What is the difference between a tuple and a list that's "obvious" to a novice programmer? (Yes, you may claim that I change my argument to talk about lists versus tuples, but if you want to press on this line of thinking, Python's syntax for list and list-of-list declaration is the same as Perl's syntax for anonymous array declaration.)
Which parts of the requirement for a trailing comma after the first element of a single-element tuple are "obvious" to a novice programmer?
Which of those "obvious" rules are obvious cognates with other programming languages?
(What's "obvious" about Smalltalk having a strict left-to-right evaluation order, ignoring "obvious" mathematical precedence rules which schoolchildren learn?)
> ... in Perl, you've got the same expression that creates a list in one case, but not in the other...
This is still not true. The comma operator creates lists in Perl.