[alanfranz]

What is another language working that well in a larger number of areas?

[pharmakom]

Clojure

JavaScript

Typescript

OCaml

Haskell

F#

[alanfranz]

Any JVM language or .NET language will take more to interface with native libraries, it’s not the same.

Ocaml is very niche, I feel it’s an hard sell for a general purpose language. Haskell, 3x that.

JS and TS, could be. But are they so much better than Python, if better at all?

[revelio]

Native library interfacing isn't really Python's strong suit, interpreter plugins are quite painful to write.

.NET has P/Invoke which is much nicer.

JVM is getting Panama+jextract, which is the nicest yet. You can go straight from header files to pure Java bindings which don't need any extra native code at all. But it's not shipped yet :(

[alanfranz]

What is an “interpreter plugin?” Writing a Python C extension is not that painful, it’s quite well supported. And you’ve got cffi and ctypes as well.

[baq]

Python has had cffi since figuratively forever, so I’m not sure why you compare native modules to P/Invoke?

[revelio]

Most important libraries with native components are using C extensions, not cffi.

[nequo]

> Ocaml is very niche, I feel it’s an hard sell for a general purpose language. Haskell, 3x that.

The impression about Haskell’s nicheness compared with OCaml prevails. But Haskell has a larger userbase and a larger library ecosystem than OCaml.

[alanfranz]

A few years have passed since I last tried out both languages. Ocaml was sort of approachable, while Haskell required quite a different mindset imho, hence the “nicheness” from the general usage standpoint.

[xxpor]

Outside of typescript, this feels like a response from a decade ago, when Python was still mired in the 2 vs 3 problem.

What's happened to the popularity of all of these languages since 2010? Outside of JS/TS, absolutely nothing. If anything, they've lost mindshare.

[chpatrick]

I've been using Haskell professionally for 8 years and its ecosystem is laughable compared to Python.