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Personally I think Ruby does a much nicer job of this, although I use both languages on a regular basis. A complx chain of map and filter calls tends to be a lot more readable than a complex nested list comprehension.

> Once you start doing quick things with lists like the zip function, or list comprehensions, it's hard to go back.

Totally agree with you on this one, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that they're a defining feature of Python, more of functional languages, from which Python has borrowed a thing or two.

Agreed! Python is just one example of a language that does it well.

Python collections doesn't have basic data structures like red black trees (which are in java as java.util.TreeMap or c++ as std::map). You end up needing third party libraries like sortedcontainers.