Python is not my favorite programming language, but back in 2006 Python felt like a breath of fresh air for writing short programs. I felt more productive in P

Python is not my favorite programming language, but back in 2006 Python felt like a breath of fresh air for writing short programs. I felt more productive in Python than in C, C++, or Java, which were the other languages I knew at the time (I was an undergraduate CS student), and I still use Python as my first choice for short data processing scripts. In addition, Python has many libraries, built-in and external. When I worked as an AI researcher before returning to academia, Python was our team's main language since there's a rich ecosystem of numerical computing and machine learning libraries. I agree, though, that the ecosystem has many rough edges, especially when it comes to package management, dependency management, and environments/containers. This is especially true in the AI ecosystem, especially as a researcher, where I had to deal with third-party code that is sometimes written by people who are solid scientists but have little software engineering experience. I'm now back in academia as a teaching-oriented professor; it's been a few months now since I've had to use pip and conda, though I have written some Python scripts to aid with grading. I teach C++ and Haskell to undergrads now, and I also have side projects involving Scheme and Common Lisp :).