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by grooot 1362 days ago
As someone new to python, I don’t understand this attitude.

I have decades of experience, having shipped code in swift, obj-c, Java, Scala, closure, ocaml, C, C++.

A few weeks ago I was asked to write something substantial in python. I have used python in the past for scripts of < 10 lines, so the syntax is not alien.

I have been extremely impressed by the experience. Async code just works and is very efficient. The match statement is very nice. Interacting with the OS is intuitive and well supported. I’m hard pressed to think of a language that would be more concise for what I’m doing.

I’ve had the same experience with JS recently too. It’s a good language now, and it decidedly wasn’t prior to ES6.

If I wind back 10 years or 20 years, there is just no way the languages as they were as capable as they are now. I can do much more with much less code.

The languages may be more complex, but they enable my code to be less complicated, and me to get more done.

1 comments

It sounds like you have the experience to use Python well, and haven't (yet) had to work with problematic Python code. I don't mean this dismissively, I think a lot of things are "trajectory dependent" if you will. E.g. I'm just starting out with OCaml after years of mostly Python and I'm pretty stoked, but I haven't yet had time to find the rough spots and warts, eh?
It sounds as if you’ve had to maintain a bad codebase in Python. I don’t think any language will save you from that. OCaml (a contender for my favorite language) certainly won’t. My comment is about what the language does for me when I write my own code.