It is built to work with pipes, it's fast, concise, stable, and easy to extend. The REGEX integration is superb.

It seems to me that we have a couple of generations of programmers who turn up their nose at anything that isn't Python notation and then repeat vague arguments about Python's superiority. But like all dogmatic systems, there is no agreement among the zealots.

Python is far from perfect; I see many problems in the Python ecosystem. There remains much to be said for concision and expressivity in other languages. In any case, by the time one has written enough Python, one sees that the "purity of notation" is a myth. And the DSLs within Python (Pandas, Numpy) offer their own pain.

awk, sed, grep, C, C++, Java, and Perl are excellent tools.