While what you say is true, my small example shows that the code is longer in Python for solving the same problem, i.e. `my_list[0] if my_list else None` is lon

While what you say is true, my small example shows that the code is longer in Python for solving the same problem, i.e. `my_list[0] if my_list else None` is longer than `my_list.headOption` or `my_list.first`. And we are talking about the brevity of a language here.