What you can achieve in a couple of pages of Python can be pretty spectacular. It’s also mostly very easy-to-read, with the possible exception of class inheritance, which is confusing mess.

If you need to write more than a couple of pages, then its lack of types becomes a hindrance to me - doing refactors when functions can take basically any arguments is quite painful, for instance. Not requiring any particular structure is great, up until you start to struggle with lack of structure.

Ideal programming language for when you’re wanting to do something that would be a bit too unwieldy for a shell script. It also makes network requests and json parsing very straightforward, so it’s great for interacting with REST APIs and writing simple microservices. Fast to write and runs quite quickly, so a good choice for Advent Of Code-like tasks. Would probably choose a different language for larger projects or when working in a team, though.

Yeah, some of the answers it produces are very questionable. The implementation of a lot of the stat functions is super-naive and not very stable in borderline cases. Take the standard deviation of three identical numbers, get an answer which is nearly-but-not-quite zero. They’ve also refused to improve their algorithms as it might break existing customer worksheets.

A CD with RedHat on it? Pretty fancy. My first RH installation came on about three boxes of floppy disks, took hours to unpack it all. And damn right, been all uphill since.