Let me preface this by saying I have no source to prove what I’m about to say, but Guido van Rossum aimed to create a programming language that feels more like a natural language without being just a toy language. He envisioned a real programming language that could be used by non-programmers, and for this to work it couldn’t contain the usual footguns.

One could argue that he succeeded, considering how many members of the scientific community, who don’t primarily see themselves as programmers, use Python.