I definitely would never use Python in production. But it remains an amazing tool for prototyping and writing quick dirty scripts.
I can reasonably expect Python to be installed on every Linux system, the debugging experience is amazing (e.g. runtime evaluation of anything), there's a vast amount of libraries and bindings available, the amount of documentation is huge and it's probably the language LLMs know best.
If there were two languages I would suggest anyone to start with, it would be C and Python. One gives a comprehensive overview of low-level stuff, the other gives you actual power to do stuff. From there on you can get fancy and upgrade to more advanced languages.
Oh 100%, there's definitely an important trade-off, and it's important to know. But there was definitely a cultural disdain and judgment for "why are you using python to create a simple side project - C is superior".
It's still important to know both, and especially when I began working on aspects like multithreading I found my basis in C helped me learn far easier, but i'm definitely more supportive of the ship it mindset.
It's better to have a bad side project online than have none - you learn far more creating things then never making things, and if you need LLMs and Python to do that, fine!
I think it depends on how you approach these tools, personally I still quite focus on learning general, repeatable concepts from LLMs as i'm an idiot who needs different terms repeated 50 times in similar ways to understand them properly!
Programmers love to pretend their crap needs to handle FFANG loads to give them an excuse to overengineer :)
In many many cases Python will be perfectly fine until you hit absolutely massive loads, and even then you can optimise the hot path with something else while keeping the rest as is.
I can reasonably expect Python to be installed on every Linux system, the debugging experience is amazing (e.g. runtime evaluation of anything), there's a vast amount of libraries and bindings available, the amount of documentation is huge and it's probably the language LLMs know best.
If there were two languages I would suggest anyone to start with, it would be C and Python. One gives a comprehensive overview of low-level stuff, the other gives you actual power to do stuff. From there on you can get fancy and upgrade to more advanced languages.