You have a completely different (wrong?) definition of ergonomics in software. Aesthetics is part of ergonomics.
No it isnt. How pretty something looks, when it has no effect on usability itself, does not fall under ergonomics. Ergonomics is defined as the following:
“Ergonomics is a body of knowledge about human abilities, human limitations and other human characteristics that are relevant to design. Ergonomic design is the application of this body of knowledge to the design of tools, machines, systems, tasks, jobs and environments for safe, comfortable and effective human use”
Therefore things like “this can be done in less lines of code” would be ergonomics, but “this looks pretty but has no other advantages” is not. Ergonomics is always about usability, not how pretty something is.
As is a readable and expressive syntax, an effective standard library, good tooling, and so on.
If that described what we are talking about then yes, I’d agree it is an ergonomics issue. However the two syntaxes have absolutely no different in their readability or expressiveness. Which is why I say this has nothing to do with ergonomics. If one syntax actually was easier to read or write then I might agree, but as pointed out both are equal and even have the smae number of key presses. Actually if you want to get technical the python version needs one less key pres (the dot) and thus would be the more ergonomic of the two.
having to read backwards from deeply nested function calls is neither of these. And, indeed, it also looks ugly, but that’s the least of the concerns.
You dont have to “read backwards”, you are reading forwards with that syntax. It is only “backwards” if you consider your preferred syntax as forward, which is arbitrary.
Its like saying “Joe rides the horse” is a bad sentence because its backwards and “The horse is ridden by joe” is the correct one because its forwards. When in reality they are just reverse order of eachother and neither is the privileged “forward” version.