[dkersten]

Languages encourage various ways or styles of solving problems, though, and some of those ways require more self-discipline or care than others. For example, many languages with static types make it so that you can make sweeping changes to the interfaces between things and the compiler will catch any mismatches for you, but in a language like Python, you'd better hope you have a unit test that will catch it.

I like Python well enough, have been using it since mid-2001 and was very much a hardcore Python enthusiast for a number of years, but nowadays I prefer languages that encourage immutability and functional programming styles, as I find that they make it much easier to avoid bugs. I've had plenty of Python experiences where bugs were caused because something somewhere else was mutating stuff behind my back, messing up my mostly-unrelated code. Usually this other code was also written by someone else, so I had no way of knowing about it. This kind of thing can be prevented in other languages, but requires a lot of discipline to avoid in Python (and other languages, I'm only picking on Python here since that's the topic of the article). These problems won't follow you to the next language, if the next language is more suited to avoid them.