I somewhat agree with your point, however I really believe that Python makes it possible to write FASTER and better software because it focuses on developer productivity. Just read the YouTube story.

Python is pretty speedy for its intended use case of flexible scripting, though certainly can bog down in large projects or lots of for loops.

Python puts programmer read/write efficiency at the top of the list.

Then why isn’t there a function to flatten a list in Python?

I’m not sure what Python’s priorities are, besides majorly sucking.

I can write software in Scala or OCaml or Racket in less than half the time of Python, while also being 10x faster.

Python needs to die. It’s the most worthless language I’ve ever been forced to use.

> Then why isn’t there a function to flatten a list in Python?

There's a function to flatten an arbitrary iterable into a flattened iterable and a function to turn any iterable into a list.

> I can write software in Scala or OCaml or Racket in less than half the time of Python, while also being 10x faster.

Many people, on many types of problems, find the reverse of the first relationship.

What tangible advantages does Python have compared to Racket? The only thing I can think of are the high quality data science libraries.

> why isn’t there a function to flatten a list in Python?

After a decade of writing and maintaining Python, I've never needed to flatten a list.

> can write software in Scala

I have seen projects in Scala and can't make sense of the types or data flow.

When I show non Python programmers a snippet of Python they have a good chance of getting the sense of it.

Flatten a list in Python using list comprehension

flat_list = [item for sub_list in orig_list for item in sublist ]

Using itertools

flat_list = list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(orig_list))

There's a case to be made that flattening a list is not a common enough operation to justify a built-in keyword or even a method on the standard library list class. The Pythonic way seems to be that if you can write something with a simple and clear one-liner then it's better and clearer to have people use that one-liner than another built-in method that people would have to go look up the implementation of.

I think you're feeding a troll here. Anyone with time enough in engineering or programming can recognize and respect these sorts of tradeoffs without trash talking least favorite tool.