According to people who work with a lot of programmes teaching coding, the reason python is so appealing to new coders is the syntax. Particularly the lack of braces, the indents, the nice keywords, that make reading code much easier to a newcomer.

Having taught both python and JavaScript, I can tell you that the former is far far less confusing to newcomers than the latter. Imagine explaining the problem with equality comparison or prototypes in JS to someone who just learnt what an IF statement is.

The reason I agree that python will dominate programming for decades to come is the batteries included and pythonic approach that enables people to do cool things with just a few lines of code. As a result of the above, the ecosystem has reached critical mass. For most tasks there’s a library that does that, and it’s good, and it’s easy to use, and the developer of the library usually doesn’t expect you to understand their opinionated philosophy to use it.

I love the python convention of putting a minimal example on the homepage of a library.

You’re not going to get your average developer to appreciate the beauty of Lisp or the value of static typing. They want their ML to work, or their graphics to display, that’s all. Ends not means, almost entirely, for most people who aren’t full-time programmers.

Let’s not hate on a language that opens up programming to the world, unless we want to be gatekeepers. If you want to maintain an air of superiority, just learn Lisp or Haskell or C++ and write code that’s “deeper” into the tech labyrinth. Programming will probably specialise into “end user programming” and “Service and system programmers”. Embrace the democratisation of coding.