[1attice]

A lot of folks (including me) find Python limiting for non-trivial use cases. The One Python Way was a great selling point in 2004, but the thing is, it's still basically the same Way in 2024. So, I hope you like nerfed lambdas and inheritance

[fire_lake]

I totally agree but always find myself in a very small minority when expressing this. People love Python and I don’t understand it.

For me the issue is that one cannot write in a “light functional programming” style in Python. The language lacks many simple things, but chief of them is multi-line lambdas! In 2024 I’m very surprised that people aren’t clamouring for this.

[BaculumMeumEst]

Ignoring the social benefits (which is easily the biggest draw of the language), Python feels really optimal for quick, simple tasks. The language lends itself to not overthinking it and building simple solutions.

[1attice]

Expanding on this point (because it's important):

A lot of folks (including me) find Python limiting for non-trivial use cases. The One Python Way was a great selling point in 2004, but the thing is, it's still basically the same Way in 2024, and the fact that the language has been designed so exhaustively to ensure that there is only one correct way to do stuff, there has never been room for evolution. (Insufficient entropy!)

I'm going to compare it to JavaScript/TypeScript, because it's what I know best in 2024, and because it's an engaging contrast; yet the take-home message is also applicable to other languages, such as Rhombus (which looks cool!)

Python feels timeless to me, like Roman majuscules. It was, in its day, brilliant: cleaner than Java, saner than Perl, and just so, so hackable. The strong Pythonic cultural rejection of Perl's 'more than one way to do it' dictum was powerfully clarificatory; we didn't have StackOverflow, and the _good_ technical resources were still all in physical books, so being able to learn one pretty-good way of expressing a concept or pattern was magical.

But, like roman majusucles, Python didn't evolve, because it didn't have to. The marginal cost of change threatened the original value proposition, so it just didn't really ever happen.

By contrast, while e.g. JavaScript had to evolve, because it was gobsmackingly bad, the necessity of that evolution has made made JavaScript (as a community and language) open to variation, change, competing paradigms, and imports from academe and research. Evolution loves a mess.

TypeScript, for example, happened nearly overnight, and as a result of it and other innovations, I can spend my day working blissfully in algebraic types, doing frigging set theory to do precise type hinting, and passing around pure functions and immutable structures. My code runs everywhere, and my coding style is always changing (improving!), and the only real price I've had to pay is learning some regrettable nonsense about an extra '=' in my comparison operators, and maybe the idiocy of having both `undefined` and `null` types.

Whereas, when I peep the pythonista channels at my work, I notice they are still having essentially the same conversation about eliminating the GIL that I remember them having in 2007 (yes I am old.)

Which is not to say that Python is _bad_, per se; there are obvious advantages to having an imperfect but opinionated lingua franca, and I'd sure rather be thrown into an unfamiliar Python codebase from 10 years ago than an unfamiliar JavaScript codebase of an equivalent age.

Yet I'll warrant that Python's long summer of success, combined with its one-way-to-do-it culture, close the mind and the imagination, and will eventually make it less fit-for-purpose than its competition. It will remain in use, and it will even find new contexts (machine learning, say) but 'the code part of the codebase' will be done in other languages.

I suspect Python will, thanks to its exceptional readability and regularity, become a configuration language --- a part of the UI, essentially, a sort of shell. It will also continue to be a language used to teach programming. Hanging on here and there, sort of like how Latin hangs around in biology and medicine. But legacy Python codebases, thanks to that very readability, will probably be rewritten sooner rather than later.

Standards (Latin, Python) are _useful_, and _timeless_ standards are some of the most valuable artifacts humans have ever produced.

But it's the Innovator's Dilemma for sure.

[smokel]

Hm, I don't think the "one way of doing things" koan holds up in practice, other than being a nice narrative.

Nearly all other languages strive for doing things in one way, it is not something that makes Python unique. In fact, Python typically offers a complete mess of ways in which to solve something. Classes are sometimes good, sometimes they're not. Lists or Numpy arrays or Torch tensors, the choice depends mostly on performance, not on style.

And Python is evolving. There is optional type checking for instance.

[mkesper]

The 'one way of doing things' mantra must be seen against the crazy ways of Perl (and later Ruby).

[1attice]

Just so. Code written in Python has always had the virtue of being _incredibly boring_, which is a virtue that, at the time of its inception, was criminally undervalued; this was, after all, the heyday of C++, and if you weren't bringing operator overloading and multiple inheritance and generics to the table, the hipsters sniffed.

For example, no one complained that Python had multiple inheritance; instead, we thought this was _a point in its favour_, over and against Java. (I imagine Guido added it grudgingly as a vox-populi.)

Thus, the Pythonic mindset emerged as a sort of 'refusal of the call', sort of like Indiana Jones shooting the sword guy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQKrmDLvijo). You could be against the hermetic complexity of Perl, but do it better than Java! Neat!

These days, however, I suspect that Python, while still boring, is boring in the _wrong_ way, leaving opportunities for concision, clarity and performance on the table -- now-basic stuff like immutable datatypes, monads, tail recursion, concatenative programming, and so on.

Python is the hobbit that stayed in Hobbiton.

[behnamoh]

> python feels timeless

As a longtime python programmer I disagree. Python is so stuck in its old ways that several useful and interesting PEPs just get rejected. In 2024, the thought of not having macros, a decent version manager, not being able to modify running code despite being an interpreted language, not having multi line lambdas, not having several of core language features in lambdas (e.g., no try/except), the pain of creating thunks, the overhead of closures, not being able to read module files easily (if they’re in another directory), etc. make Python one of the most frustrating languages.

[frou_dh]

Python arguably has better support for working with sum-types (algebraic types) than TypeScript does, because the language actually has a `match` statement (since 2021). Define a sum-type as a Union of dataclasses and the static type-checker (Pyright) can even tell you when your pattern-matching statements are non-exhaustive.

Do you track such developments, or spend the time dreaming up these elaborate theories? :)

[1attice]

Not particularly (point taken), but I _do_ note that describing a napkin-sketch as an 'elaborate theory' is perhaps more flattering than you mean it to be ;)

[umanwizard]

I can't tell what you mean concretely, because the two examples you give -- gradual typing and lack of concurrently executing threads -- are common to both languages. Python has support for gradual typing, and JavaScript is single-threaded (which is an even stronger property than having a GIL).

[1attice]

As I said, JavaScript was an example, picked because I work it it every day.

There are most certainly better examples, that I am less equipped to present; Rust springs to mind.

Yet whatever example is chosen, the claim remains unchanged: Python experiences the Innovator's Dilemma.