I am admittedly late to the party. I went to a university where they taught Java (and unfortunately not Python). For the last 10 years, Java has paid the bills

I am admittedly late to the party. I went to a university where they taught Java (and unfortunately not Python). For the last 10 years, Java has paid the bills, and it still does, so I'm not knocking Java. I stuck with it for so long because I felt that it took that much real world usage to get a good grip on the language. But you are right --- I'm definitely not the first developer to have had that "moment of zen" when opening files in Python, but hopefully I'm also not the last.