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Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

This is just a property of having libraries. If you've got the same libraries in Java then the code looks identical except that you stick to word "var" in front of lines 4 and 6 and you don't have named arguments.

Python does have a great data processing ecosystem. But that isn't really a property of the language.

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Creating a new venv, installing a few needed libraries that you know the names of with a simple command and writing a quick low-ceremony script that uses those libraries is frictionless in Python. Doing that repeatedly in nearly every other major language is not as easy.

Some languages have a good integrated tool chain (Rust, Go) but are not as approachable and forgiving.

Some are approachable but lack the friction-free story for locating and installing 3rd party dependencies.

Poetry is indeed very nice for that. Bit of a learning curve but then very easy to push packages to PyPI or internal things like Artifactory.

The most similar language to Python is Ruby, not Rust or Go, and Ruby is better at the things you've listed. Which would bring us back to the previous point that it's not actually about ease of use.

Someone else identified Ruby's fatal flaw as not having good C tooling, and I think that's probably accurate.

Ruby has odd, once unique syntax that looks strange to anyone raised on C-like syntax, including js and java. Python is similar, simply removing redundant braces. So no ruby was not better at things most folks care about, i.e. being easy to learn.

You seem to have confused personal familiarity with ease of learning.

Things that are familiar are easier to learn, it’s a fact. As someone raised on math and English notation, then industry exposure. Ruby being a odd duck did it no favors.

Python definitely found footing based on its pseudocode readability. It’s gotten a bit worse recently with too many colons and features but already made it.

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