One of my subtle peeves is people who loved doing A Thing in one language feel like they have to cram it into the next language they move to, whether or not it works. Python is becoming a victim of this weird habit.
And you know I originally made that mistake! Only with Pascal. I was hoping for functions and procedures in Python, but I eventually had to learn that Python isn't about that. I had to take the language on its own terms.
What's bad and happening to Python? If it's type hints, they're an invaluable addition for large codebases IMO, and they're entirely optional unless you set up tooling to enforce them.
I will never make the tactical mistake of pointing to a single thing. Too easy to bikeshed.
No, I just keep pointing back to the idea that there should be one obvious way to do "it," whatever it is you need. As people vote for their favorite whatever from another language, the number of options of how to do something increases, drastically. The reason for a "language of mostly idioms" (maybe not to "Shaka, when the walls fell" level) is that we must read and maintain our code.
I am a Perl refugee. It had the opposite philosophy: many ways to skin a cat. The result was a write-once, read-only-in-abject-terror language. You never knew if someone decided it was Code Golf Day and they wanted to try to cram in a dozen things into a single string of executable line noise.
I think Python is (slowly) abandoning some of the PEP 20 precepts one hardly-objectionable feature at a time.
Any single feature recently added would find an advocate and a defender. Therefore, selecting one of the bunch is a mistake because it does not focus on the actual problem: the pack of features, plural, getting added in.
It is like someone dumping a ton of sand in your driveway. "Surely you cannot object to this grain of sand. Or that one. Or this one over here." The problem is in the aggregate.
I would say the most noticeable version of this happened a while ago when clearly a lot of java programmers were working on the standard library and you wound up with a lot of heavily class-and -inheritance-based code which really did not need to be done that way in Python.
