Instead of a blanket criticism, perhaps you'd like to suggest some alternatives that:

- Have simple, pseudocode-ish syntax

- Are useful for exploratory programming with good speed of development

- Have a comparable amount of high quality libraries available along with tooling for their installation and management (standard and third part)

- Have large talent pools available with experience ranging from fresh graduates to grizzled veterans, and backgrounds ranging from science and statistics to journalism to finance

?

Playing devils advocate here, but Ruby's ticked those boxes pretty well in my experience. Also js if you don't mind sacrificing a bit of expressiveness (pseudocode-ish syntax).

Don't get me wrong, I do also love python and can see it being used for years to come. Also, I know of at least a couple of algorithmic traders using it daily.

Fair point. I suspect that the one area where significant differences can be seen between those and Python is in the communities and the types of libraries available. For example, I use Pandas most days, and I'm not aware of an equivalent/replacement in Ruby or JS. Also, I would suspect (not substantiated with evidence) that companies whose products are built around data science/wrangling/statistics may be more likely to benefit from experienced Python talent in those areas than they would from another language.