alt Hacker NewsNot having to build still saves wall clock time. Also Python is a concise language (fewer tokens in context) with a monster ecosystem that avoids a lot of code having to written by agents (fewer tokens for the current task and fewer for future tasks by keeping the code base smaller).
Most of that monster ecosystem is exactly that: monstrous code in one-off throwaway libraries written by people who don't care about software, as it's not their job.
If you set a bar, any bar, there's really not much offered by Python that you cannot find in a more reasonable language. Especially if you're gluing together C++ and Rust libraries for data processing or ML workloads. Python is still disproportionately popular there but I'm also convinced its days are counted. C++ will be tremendously harder to get rid of, in comparison, if that's even possible.