I think the meme come from the fact that in 00s and early 10s most people looked at Python code coming from C++ and Java.

In Java bad OOP conventions were commonplace, like everything using getters/setters, deeply nested class hierarchies and insane patterns like AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean. It got impossible to figure out what's going on.

C++ just got every possible feature that badly interacts with each other, in an amount that never could fit in a single person's context window. That basically led to a situation where every programmer or company had it's own dialect of the language; the other dialects than your own were mostly incomprehensive.

Python has it's own share of bad features, and for a long time really bad ecosystem around the language - Python 2 vs Python 3; eggs vs wheels; easy_install vs pip; 123489 ways of installing Python and each of them bad. But, once it started to become better, in the mid-late 10s, around Python 3.5 or 3.6, it exploded in popularity.

C# is also a great language, but notice how it have been moving closer to Pyhon-style syntax. E.g. now you can initialize a list like [a, b, c]. They wouldn’t add that syntax if they didnt think it was an improvement.

Less ceremony and boilerplate means more readable code.

Reaaaally?

I think a lot of the readability of python is in the fact you don't need to be recently familiar with it to pick up what its doing most of the time.

Over my career I've dipped in and out of rust, typescript, perl, swift, etc codebases. I'm no expert in any of these, but every single time I have to look something up to understand what this set of arcane symbols or syntax means.

When I dip into Python I just ... read it.

(None of this is to say I prefer Python, just that I really do get the readable thing)

"whitespace, not brackets" from a sibling comment touches on it, but a lot of people, beginners especially (but not uniquely), are put off by symbols when reading code. Python is less symbol-heavy than most languages, by using whitespace and syntax and words (eg. `and` not `&&`, explicit `lambda x:` rather than `x =>`) in their place. It doesn't go so far as COBOL as to be cumbersome, but far enough to make a difference to a lot of people.

Python USED to be easy to read, before a lot of the newer features like type hints crept in. 20 years ago, Python looked like executable pseudocode.

I agree, especially very "pythonic" structures if overly shortened are hard to decipher especially if you don't use or read python on a regular basis.

Often times when I am reading a medium or advanced python codebase I need to look into the function definitions and operator documentation to understand what is supposed to be returned. Where with C-like languages I feel it is easier to build that context because there is more context written and less tricky syntactic sugar.

I agree. My kotlin is readable. The functional code with typing all the way tells what every step is doing. My same code in python is a hot mess of nested list comprehensions and lacking lambdas.

" and before that I was a C# developer"

So .. you were already trained in reading abstract.

A beginner on the other hand sees lots of intimitading {} in C family languages everywhere. And Python does not need them and less is usually better in design.

The "other than that" is whitespace, not brackets. Whether that's a big deal is up to you, but the carry on effect of that is that the code is indented the way the control flow interprets it, so there are no bugs from misplaced braces. (Plenty of other bugs for other reasons, unfortunately.)

People confuse having fewer keywords/concepts to learn for readability, which is not really the same thing.

Someone who is equally expert at Java and Python will probably consider Java to be more readable.

Other than that? Exactly that!

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