I tend to agree. I am just finishing up a tool I'm using to automate a bunch of interactions I have with the 4 USB UARTs on my desk and I ended up going with expect. If I knew about pexpect I would have probably used that.

However, since I did use expect and spent some time learning Tcl, I actually did appreciate one useful thing about it. It's very easy for me to in-line Tcl code into, say, a configuration, parse it with the help of `[info complete]`, attach it to a list and then expand that list `{*}$some_list` as an argument to `expect` or `interact`. I can now have UART specific macros that are bound to keystrokes like Ctrl-t x. Sure I could do something like that in python, but it probably wouldn't be as clear-cut as:

  # Fix terminal row/col height for less, vi, etc
  # type Ctrl-t r
  bind[r] = {
    # depends on xterm size info, may not be universal
    send "\{ "
    send {old=$(stty -g);}
    send {stty raw -echo min 0 time 5;}
    send {printf '\033[18t' > /dev/tty;}
    send {IFS=';t' read -r _ rows cols _ < /dev/tty;}
    send {stty "$old";}
    send {stty cols "$cols" rows "$rows";}
    send {unset old cols rows;}
    send {shopt -s checkwinsize;}
    send {clear;}
    send " \}\r"
  }