This is evasive. How often did you see people describe Python that way before it became as widespread as it is now?

> And I consider its syntax, especially semantic indentation which eliminates so much visual noise, to be the best among all languages that ever achieved widespread adoption.

And for me it is why Python will never even make my top 10 preferred languages, and is a language I actively avoid when I have a chance, because I find it visually absolutely awful. I'd suspect (yes, it's pure speculation) you'll find about as many people who detest Python over that alone, as who find Python "delightful". Useful, sure, but finding people who describe Python as delightful is a rarity.

But as I said, some people find brutalist architecture to be amazing too, and that's fair enough.

Quite a lot back in the early 2.x era before the Rails hype first kicked in. It really was a breath of fresh air compared to VB, Perl, JS, early Java or PHP of the time. It had a concise elegant clarity and consistency missing in other mainstream languages back then. And it was a relatively unknown underdog.

eg relevant to HN, here is PG talking about Python 20yrs ago: https://paulgraham.com/pypar.html

I've spent the last decade in Ruby shops and not done much Python recently, but I still miss those early Python days. Ruby never gave me the same sense of happiness it gave others and there are still things I prefer about Python. But it is subjective and I couldn't objectively say Python is better than Ruby.

Things are very different now - it is a much larger language with a much longer history to trip over, pulled in multiple directions with conflicting expectations, and the user base has changed from that small passionate dedicated community to being the intro to coding blub language that Java or PHP used to be where the average skill level is much lower.