Competent Language Designers
Rick Jelliffe: if you make up or maintain a public text format, and you don’t provide a mechanism for clearly stating the encoding, then, on the face of it, you are incompetent. If you make up or maintain a public text format, it is not someone else’s job to figure out the messy encoding details, it is your job.
I guess it would follow that Python and Perl are competent programming languages.