JS and Java... well they're not something I think a lot of programmers want to be. JS has a pretty complicated ecosystem that a lot of developers don't like. Java is good at what it's good at, but it's not very fun.
What I see a lot of is "lisp" or "lisp-like" and "pythonic". Those languages are notable for being considered fun by a lot of programmers.
But yes, it's idiomatic. Python is an idiomatic programming language that has sacrificed a lot for that ideology. Now that guido is gone it's less ideological, and we're getting things like type-hinting.
When people try to apply that same ideology to other fields, sometimes they call it pythonic. When they try to apply the lisp ideology to other fields, they just call it a lisp dialect instead of lisp-ish.
Learnt this in Pycon 2014 if I recall correctly.
Are type hints Pythonic? I personally don't think so - to me, they don't match the philosophy of the rest of the language. On the other hand, one could argue that the definition of Pythonic is simply "whatever Guido likes".
I actually much prefer modern JS to modern python. JS is flexible enough to allow a functional-ish style, which greatly improves code clarity in my opinion. And of course you can still write python-style code if you want to. Python is a lot more opinionated!
I've seen it for other languages, including those two, and denying the term wont deny the concept.
I've seen perl, python, and javascript written like C, java written like perl, etc. Its always a bad idea - each language has strengths in the ability to express concepts to other devs, part in syntax and part in conventions, and swimming upstream against those never helps anyone. (Evolution is great, chaos is not)
None of which says that these terms CAN'T be used in an elitist way, but I dont see that as the primary purpose or use (at least in the circles I'm exposed to)
Meaning, as an exmaple Java and JS aren't known for their constant references and inside jokes relating to Monty Python. That is part of the culture and community around Python.
Saying something is Pythonic instead of saying it is idiomatic, is itself, Pythonic. It is part of the culture grown up around the language. And that's okay.
Edit: Of course I should have read TFA before replying. Of course this is not a Python like language, but a language that compiles to Python. I agree the cute name is confusing, but if the point is to compile to a specific language, saying what that language is is pretty important ;-)
Whenever I write Python I try to keep it 'pythonic' and that mainly means keeping things simple, very explicit, and concise. These are obviously traits that all developers want their code to have, but sometimes the syntactic sugar of a language can make it difficult, I think the Pythonic philosophy provides guardrails against this.
That said, it immediately told me that I wouldn't be interested in Coconut, so I also found the label valuable as a non-Python person.
And I don't see how that's a problem? Every language has a subculture around it, language specific jargon, even inside jokes.
Pythonic stems from the idea of simple ways to do "stuff", and that's pretty much it.
"Pythonic" doesn't just mean "idiomatic". Python has design principles[1] that influence new idioms.