Python wasn't my first programming language. And I think I gave a fair chance to other languages. But there come these moments where you are like "oh, this would be really simple in imperative code". Ideology gets in the way; to claim the opposite is just kidding yourself.

I probably gave the most chance to Common Lisp. It's a very pragmatic language too, unfortunately (largely for historical reasons), the standard library didn't keep the pace. It's not just a matter of what you can do, it's also the design. Python standard libraries almost always put the user first and the purity second.

For instance, Python would never add versions of functions remove-if, remove-if-not, delete-if, delete-if-not. That's mathematical purity (in if vs. if-not) and letting the onus of choice on user (in delete-if vs. remove-if) instead of conservatively making reasonable default.

At the same time, Common Lisp library lacks things like function to strip whitespace from string; you can do it, but Python has it as a function. It's just hundreds of little things like these that make Python more pleasant to work with.

I genuinely want to like Lisp more than Python (I am learning Clojure about now, which is on par with Common Lisp when it comes to pragmatism). But sometimes it is just a little more frustrating, because of ideology and not putting user first when it comes to API design.