Python: The Documentary [video]

In India people call initiation as Deekhsha.

This is where the guru whispers (3 times) to you the seed letters which one has to imbibe over decades of sadhana by lacs of repetition

this looks similar

#rememberThis

I feel so similar. I love python, I’ve spent most of my career writing it. It’s done well for me. But damn is it just not fun anymore. Runtime errors are not fun anymore. Runtimes are not fun. Virtualenvs are not fun anymore even though uv is trying. Typeless loosy goosy code that passes dictionaries all over the place is just not fun. Rust ruined it for me. Or maybe I’m just bored.

> Letting functions take anything as an argument and then just assuming it's a duck with the methods you want is no way to write a robust system

Everyone keeps harping on type safety, but it just doesn't play out in reality. Linux Kernel is incredibly robust, has never been a broken mess, and has basically no type enforcement, as you can cast pointers into other stuff.

In general, all typing does is move error checking into the compiler/preprocessor instead of testing. And time spent on designing and writing type safe code is almost equivalent to time spent writing tests that serve as an end-to-end contract.

There is a reason why NodeJS was the most used language before all the AI stuff came with Python.

>Performance wise you're boxed into a corner. The slow runtime will have you writing native code in another language, complicating your project.

Most of these performance arguments are similar to arguging that your commuter car needs to be a track spec Ferrari in terms of performance, by people that have very little experience with cars.

Plenty of fast/performant stuff runs on Python. PyPy is a thing also. So is launching small compiled executables like a process, that takes literally one line of code in Python.

>The GIL will have you jumping through hoops to work around.

This is just laughable. Clearly you have extremely little experience with Python.

>>Agreed, as an OO scripting language it's lovely, especially compared to Perl where the OO features never meshed quite right.

Back then the whole OO crowd was with Java though.

Python's Moat was beginner friendliness to write simple scripts, which at the time- Perl was more like a thermonuclear scripting language. Most people who never wanted to graduate to that advanced stage of writing mega million lines of Perl code over a week(which was literally the use of Perl then), realised they needed some thing simpler, easier to learn, and maintain for smaller scripts- Kind of moved to Python.

But then of course simplicity only takes you that far, and its logically impossible to have a simple clean interface to problems that require several variables tweaked. Python had to evolve and is now having the same bloat and complications that plague any other language.

Having said that, I would still use Java if I had to start a backend project.

I think a lot of it is things have shifted away from the raw language. Less and less you’re dealing with Python, and more an assortment of libraries or frameworks. Pandas, numpy, torch, fastapi, …, and a dozen others.

Packaging has been a nightmare. PyPI has had its challenges. Dependency management is vastly improved thanks to uv - recently, and with a graveyard of tools in its wake.

The modern Python script feels more like loosely combining a temperamental set of today’s latest library apis, and then dealing with the fallout. Sometimes parallels the Node experience.

I think an actual Python project - using only something remotely modern like 3.2+ standard library and maybe requests - is probably just as clean, resilient, and reliable as it ever was.

A lot of these things are and/or have been improving tremendously. But think to your point the language (or really the ecosystem) is scaling and evolving a ton and there’s growing pains.

> However I started using Nim a few years back which has given me that Python 2 feeling – except with static types, better overall language design, meta-programming, and performance!

And except tooling, ecosystem, documentation and practical real-world application.

I love reading comments like this because it just makes me feel good about my life choices.

You are aware that things like your bank and insurance all run on COBOL, right?

> Those little 20-500 line scripts were just so much more fun in Python than anything else though

It's notable that you've written this in the past tense. These kinds of scripts don't seem to be a focus for Python any more.

In fact, I recently heard as justification for a new Python feature: "it helps us with our 100-million-line Python codebase". The language has become extremely complex as it prioritizes the needs of a few teams writing millions of lines over millions of developers each writing relatively few lines.

The reason is that the design team are all working on these large codebases and, understandably, mostly focused on what makes their own lives easier. I was hopeful that in the transition from a BDFL-based governance system to a Steering Council, we would see a larger variety of experience and opinions designing the language. Instead, I don't think there has ever been a single scientist, finance worker etc on the Steering Council - it's always software developers, almost always employees of large software companies.

IMO NodeJS popularity was expected. After all these years you still can't use anything other than JS on the frontend (WASM is still too green). So if you are going to master a language you might as well use it in the backend too.