True, but the problem is that in pursuit of that mantra the language has wound up disempowering engineers and has forced even more decisions about trade-offs on

True, but the problem is that in pursuit of that mantra the language has wound up disempowering engineers and has forced even more decisions about trade-offs onto them: do you want readability, performance, or maintainability? You usually can't have all of them because of some lurking performance tar pit. An example here is the conflict between needing top level imports for sanity and static analysis (there was an instagram blog on this a while ago) while also wanting fast startup time. If you import requests at the top level then you cannot have fast startup time, so you wind up importing it outside the top level so that code paths that don't use requests don't have to pay the time cost of loading it, but then you have imports that aren't at the top level! edit: oh, and don't even get me started on pkg_resources [0], which isn't just a tarpit, it is a full blown blackhole beartrap waiting for the unsuspecting. 0. https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/issues/510 https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/issues/510