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by dgan 1054 days ago
Python is a gravity pool attracting unexperienced programmers. And very often (in my experience) , it shows.

Lack of static typing is nothing in comparison with lack of common sense and unwillingness to learn ("why force oneself ? The job market swallows everything anyway") .

2 comments

Well said! Another way of putting it: Python isn't a production-ready language, due to the way people are using it.

Whenever some project I find doesn't just work, or works and then a few weeks later stops working, it always seems to be python. People cannot semver properly (even python itself? or is that some programs work on 3.9 and not 3.10 the programmers fault again?) and also cannot lock their dependency versions properly. Same problem that can happen to nodejs code, and yet, I rarely see such basic failures there.

I also just don't understand why anyone would even want to use python, anyway. I've tried to debug python code, or write new python code, but I could never get into it, nor was it easy to read code others had written. Whitespace sensitivity? Special __ files for package purposes? No JIT (no idea why pypy is a separate thing rather than rolled in)? I just don't see the advantage over JS which seems to do everything better. It even has the benefit of being syntactically intuitive for users of other languages, and typescript really has saved JS from chaos. It's fine to be different from C syntactically, but it I don't see the benefit of python to justify that syntax taking up another spot in my brain I could use for learning rust or something.

> Lack of static typing is nothing in comparison with lack of common sense and unwillingness to learn

I have never found any language community to lack that, and if anything its more where people have lots of experience exclusively in one language than with inexperienced programmers picking up their first (who tend to, by nature, have a willingness to learn, even if they have a lack of the common base of experience that gets labelled “common sense”.)