True, despite my joking tweet earlier, I don't think that this is at all a Python problem, except insofar as the "python community" is a huge community of people who (by virtue of its size) mostly are strangers to one another.

You're right that it's not about the language of choice. But a community is made of people. I think that the Node community's niceness has little to do with JavaScript, and more to do with the fact that there were folks like you, mikeal, maxogden, nexxy, polotek, ryah, substack, janl, etc, who imprinted the community with your sense of values and a culture of kindness early on.

But keeping that ball rolling, as the community gets bigger, is very challenging, and it does stress me out a bit. It takes such a little match to set the whole thing on fire!