[rwmj]

There's been a huge effort to get the base RHEL image size right down, so obviously getting rid of Python would help there. As for why we need to reduce the size of the base image, the answer is - as always - because containers.

[Crontab]

I agree with this. My personal opinion is that advanced scripting languages, outside of shells, shouldn't be installed by default.

(Of course, this usually gets killed pretty quickly, as dependency hell quickly brings in advanced scripting languages.)

[int_19h]

I'm curious where the line for "advanced" lies, although in principle I'd agree that Python is certainly past it.

But shouldn't interpreters be good for reducing the overall runtime code size in principle, if enough system tools run on them? High-level bytecode can be very compact.

Or better yet, compile natively, but to threaded code, and share the stdlib behind it.