It has its wrinkles, absolutely, but in general it's clean, consistent, and even beginners tend to write code that's clear. There's very little syntactic noise

It has its wrinkles, absolutely, but in general it's clean, consistent, and even beginners tend to write code that's clear. There's very little syntactic noise, very few mysterious incantations, the easy is easy, the difficult isn't so bad, and it stays out of the way of the expert and just lets you get on with it. You can program in OO style, FP style, and where it's appropriate, imperative style. It comes with libraries that cover almost everything you need (although that's where many, many wrinkles can be found). And when you need speed, it plays nicely with other languages, is easily extended, and can be compiled to run on the metal. Yes, it has its problems, but the above list is why Python is my "go to" language for play, experiments, and in some cases, deployable packages.