I agree. I used to earn my bread in PHP and now I do it in Java, while after hours I mostly code in Common Lisp. I have some experience trying to port idioms from the latter one to the former two. Sometimes it turns into a good idea (God, how much my life in one PHP project was simplified by porting over #'mapcan), sometimes you quickly realize it's stupid and makes zero sense. But I think that's again a case of taste acquired by experimentation :). A big enemy here is simply sunk costs fallacy - no matter how emotionally invested you're in some idiom, sometimes it really doesn't fit the other language.

I have tried. Two things get in the way quickly, and that's even just expressing thing, not even looking at performance yet:

  * Python standard library functions, especially the ones on dicts, mutate and don't return the new dictionary.
  * Python's syntax for creating functions is awkward: lambdas are cumbersome, and so are the operator package and eg functools.partial; there's no really convenient way to compose functions.