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Rust is hands down my favourite language and it’s what I write my personal projects in these days. Julia is second. Rusts philosophy of “the complexity doesn’t go away, so just be aware and pay it up front” and the type system and compiler feel aaaamazing to use once you grasp them: writing some code, knowing exactly how and where the failure points are and having it compile and know that it will be correct is hard to go back from. I used to be a huge Python fan, and I’d dug through docs and guides for pretty much everything I could, so my frustrations aren’t “outsider criticisms” as such. My biggest issue is the amount of “magic” that goes on and is actively encouraged; it happily lets you get away with anything, and I’ve read and had to fix too much horrible Python code that technically does what’s required, but in the most torturous and difficult-to-untangle manner possible. I’ve come to resonate with this idea of “what does the language/tooling encourage you to do” and in my experience, Python doesn’t encourage a lot of good things, but it does end up encouraging you to “hack around problems” rather than fixing them at their root, lean on magic wherever possible (which is never backed up by any kind of correctness guarantee) and let the programmer do whatever they want, regardless of how much of a bad or non-idiomatic thing it is. The “type system” leaves a lot to be desired, there’s optional type hints
now, but the larger community seems ambivalent at best-uptake is glacial in my observations and mypy is just sort of ok. The performance is pathetic, there’s no getting around that, and the response of “just write it in C if you need speed” is a poor answer. The Python core dev team seems insistent on continually stacking pointless new features in (walrus operator why?) whilst simultaneously not really doing anything about real issues (like the packaging situation). I’ve also come to really dislike exception-based error handling: having no compiler, type-checking and knowing that anything could explode anywhere isn’t a reassuring feeling once your codebase gets big enough. Yeah you can put try-catch, and code defensively to head-off issues, but it doesn’t take much before you’ve spent as much time and energy doing that as it would have taken to write it in a more suitable language but with maybe 1/10th of the guarantees and none of the performance.
If you want to write a web API, you’d be better off writing something in Golang, .Net, Typescript on NodeJS, possibly even Swift. General purpose stuff you could replace with any of those languages + Rust. Admittedly it does still have prime position for ML frameworks, but I’d be using Julia at work if it was up to me. Edit: a sibling comment mentioned Async in Python - an experience that was so frustrating I’d excised it from memory. |