[othersideofcoin]

It's a common denominator, few downsides, speed handled in lower level code/libs. Really good "get shit done" language, best GSD lang I've used. Scientists + programmers, data engineers and PhDs, all are cool w/ the syntax. It's open source, has a shitton of supporting libs.

Outside of speed, I've read very few valid criticisms. What other languages are cross-platform, great lib support, delegate easily to lower level libs for perf, are there?

(FWIW, any MS based language is probably excluded from consideration depending on its cross platform ability. Many data people -- like me! -- won't use a MS based OS)

[hacking_again]

Python has its share of cruft and idiosyncrasies. I find some of the syntax irritating, e.g. boolean logic, argument handling, hidden / private / magic symbols, and those pesky half-open intervals that routinely lead to off-by-one errors.