I liked the one way of doing most things philosophy, coming off working on a large C++ code base.
At the time I evaluated other languages to learn, narrowed it down to Ruby and Python, and picked Python as I felt it had a nicer syntax than Ruby. And the "one way to do things" philosophy. This was back in 2005 or so.
What other languages of that period would you say had a nicer syntax than Python?
Python is more readable than C. Way better than C++. Far simpler to reason about than Java. Maybe Typescript is on a similar level, but throwing a beginner into the JS ecosystem can be daunting. Perhaps Ruby could be argued as equally simple, but it feels like that's a dead end language these days. Golang is great, but probably not as easy to get rolling with as Python.
What else? Are you going to recommend some niche language no one hires for?
Strong disagreement. Explicit types make reasoning about Java much easier, especially when you are in an unfamiliar codebase.
Python is not quite the 'write-only' language of Perl, but it is a lot easier to write it than it is to read it.
The square brackets alone make it a winner. Array, list and strings indexing. Dictionary lookups. Slices and substrings. List comprehensions. The notations convenience of this alone is immense.
Built in list, string, and dicts. For the 90% of code that is not performance critical, this is a godsend. Just looking at the c++ syntax for this makes me never want to use a stl data structure for anything trivial.
is there any evidence that this makes it easier?
people learn python as beginners because it has a reputation for being easy for beginners
I don't see anything about the syntax that makes it inherently easier