Also, it wasn't a first mover in scientific computing--Matlab and Maple were around long before numpy. Matlab dates from the early 80s; numpy from 2005. Python has stolen a lot of mindshare from Matlab with numpy and scipy and Jupyter. Even today I help PhDs switch from Matlab to scipy.

Personally, I've always liked the ethic of Python that there's only one way to to do it, normally. It means the boilerplate code looks the same everywhere, and when you break the "rules" of that one way, you do it with a reason, a conscious justification, rather than as a stylistic flourish or an idiosyncratic preference.

Python is obviously not "a first mover in the scientific world" as Matlab precedes Python for over a decade and is still the de facto tool of the trade pretty much everywhere except ML.

And please don't misrepresent UX as "dumbing down". If anything, Python does right far more things that other languages do blatantly wrong and even in a user-hostile way.

> Python has no built-in regex support

This argument reads like a blatantly desperate attempt to find any thing at all to try to get Perl's leg over Python.

Meanwhile, no one ever complained about Python's re module not doing its job, and Python is extensively used pretty much everywhere, involving regex or not.

Are you basing this claim on something like not having a special literal syntax? Python has had regular expression support for ages and it works quite well: https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html