Sounds like you just don't like Python, but you don't have great reasons for not liking it. The standard library is fantastic in Python. Find better reasons to back up your unfounded dislike.
Like dragonwriter says, it shows that "Python expresses the concept fairly compactly in the core language without even resorting to stdlib".
It depends on your taste whether you like richer stdlib, and I do. But some don't.
We are talking about how short the code can be in this post, and `my_list[0] if my_list else None` (Python) is longer than `my_list.headOption` (Scala) or `my_list.first` (Ruby).
I'd appreciate more if you elaborate why my example isn't a good illustration on the brevity aspect.
The interesting takeaway from this study I think is that it does not show that statically typed (even "pure") functional languages are not obviously better than plain old Python.
The interesting thing is not what this study proves, but what it does not prove.
Could you elaborate more on this statement? Not a native english speaker here, so I don't quite understand the sentence. Thank you.