> Python is certainly in the business of trading efficiency and optimal solutions for readability and some notion of simplicity, and that has held it back

Sometimes a simple, suboptimal solution is faster in clock time than an optimal one. You have to write the code and then execute it after all.

As for why ML is dominated by python, I feel like it just gets to the point quicker than other languages. In Java or typescript or even rust there are just too many other things going on. I feel like writing even a basic training loop in Java would be a nightmare.

I do wonder how much hand wringing there is around tools like uv. The perf of Rust with the usability of python if everyone just ignores the binary blobs and FFI involved.

I personally think uv is a huge brightspot in the python ecosystem and think others will follow suit (i.e other langs embedding rust in tooling for speedups). Wonder what the rest of the ecosystem thinks.

Maybe the uv approach is really the best of both worlds — pythons dx with rusts rigor.