[ok_dad]

I’ll be that guy who says I love Python but it’s been shoved into too many spaces now. It’s been a great tool for me for writing things that require a lot of I/O and aren’t CPU bound.

I am even rethinking that now because I was able to write a program in Go with an HTTP API and using JSON as the usual API interchange format in one night (all stdlib too), and it was so easy that I plan to pitch using it for several services we need to rewrite at work that are currently in Python. That would be very similar to what I wrote in a day.

If Python doesn’t fix their packaging, performance, and the massive expansion in the language, I think it’s going to start losing ground to other languages.

[intelVISA]

Can't fault Py as a scripting lang but the lengths people go to kludge it into areas it shouldn't really be (in prod at least) is always a massive red flag for any org.

[eru]

Microsoft is bankrolling some efforts to improve Python performance. They even hired Guido for that.

(Disclosure: I'm a very minor volunteer contributor to that effort. I have a series of pull requests in the works that will improve runtime performance by about 1% across the board. I also have some more specialised improvements to memory.)

[jeremycarter]

Syntactically Python is great. Runtime though, its not. Its fast to code in - that is all.

[jmt_]

Agreed. I'm past the "it's like writing pseudo-code - so cool!" honeymoon phase and onto the "some sort of static typing is actually pretty useful" as a developer.

[aprdm]

Good thing is that python3 provides typing.

[peterashford]

Optional type hints are not the same at all.

[isitmadeofglass]

No, its better. You can build the code first, test that it functions as expected, then add types, then compile it.

This is miles ahead of having to struggle with getting types correct in C++ before you even have anything resembling a workable solution.

[ok_dad]

I don’t get the struggle with types people have. It’s not hard to use a knife instead of a hammer to cut stuff. What’s the struggle with types, specifically?

[jmt_]

I don't disagree but I wish Python had builtin support for runtime type checking. I've thought about switching to Go or Rust for certain projects but Python's rich ecosystem makes it hard for me to switch, so for now I long for runtime type checking without needing an external library (e.g typeguard).