> When you're writing working code nearly as fast as you can type and your misstep rate is near zero, it generally means you've achieved mastery of the language. But that didn't make sense, because it was still day one and I was regularly pausing to look up new language and library features!

This really jives with my experience. I learned Ruby first and used it as my scripting language of choice for years, but I constantly found myself having to lookup how to do even the most basic tasks.

A day or two after learning Python I was already as productive as I had been with Ruby, it was wild.

This isn't so much a jab at Ruby, just that Python worked the way I thought a programming language should, which made everything easy.