I agree, but can you imagine that Matlab, and then R, were the de facto ML languages before Python really took off? Putting R models into production was an absolute nightmare. Before R, I was writing bash scripts which called Perl scripts that loaded data and called C code that loaded and ran models that were custom built by Matlab and C. Python (and the resulting software ML ecosystem) was a huge breath of fresh air.

I agree with you. I also find Python to be slower for iterations and refactoring.

I ranted on about it recently - https://avi.im/blag/2023/refactoring-python/