[chrisrodrigue]

Python is really shaping up to be the lingua franca of programming languages. Its adoption is soaring in this FOSS renaissance and I think it's the closest thing to a golden hammer that we've ever had.

The PEP model is a good vehicle for self-improvement and standardization. Packaging and deployment will soon be solved problems thanks to projects such as uv and BeeWare, and I'm confident that we're going to see continued performance improvements year over year.

[silisili]

> Packaging and deployment will soon be solved problems

I really hope you're right. I love Python as a language, but for any sufficiently large project, those items become an absolute nightmare without something like Docker. And even with, there seems to be multiple ways people solve it. I wish they'd put something in at the language level or bless an 'official' one. Go has spoiled me there.

[horsawlarway]

Honestly, I'm still incredibly shocked at just how bad Python is on this front.

I'm plenty familiar with packaging solutions that are painful to work with, but the state of python was shocking when I hopped back in because of the available ML tooling.

UV seems to be at least somewhat better, but damn - watching pip literally download 20+ 800MB torch wheels over and over trying to resolve deps only to waste 25GB of bandwidth and finally completely fail after taking nearly an hour was absolutely staggering.

[SJC_Hacker]

Python was not taken seriously as something you actually shipped to non-devs. The solution was normally "install the correct version of Python on the host system". In the Linux world, this could be handled through Docker, pyenv. For Windows users, this meant installing a several GB distro and hoping it didn't conflict with what was already on the system.

[int_19h]

AI-generated code is going to be a major influence going forward. Regardless of how you feel about its quality (I'm a pessimist myself), it's happening anyway, and it's going to cement the dominant position of those languages which LLMs understand / can write the best. Which correlates strongly to their amount in the training set, which means that Python and JavaScript in particular are here to stay now, and will likely be increasingly shoved into more and more niches - even those they aren't well-suited to - solely because LLMs can write them.

[gymbeaux]

I haven’t run into anything where Python either couldn’t be used or shouldn’t be used, except for the browser of course.

I think software engineers with any significant amount of experience recognize you can build an application that does X in just about any language. To me, the largest difference, the greatest factor in which language to choose, is the existing packages. Simple example- there are several packages in Python for extracting text from PDFs (using tesseract or not). C# has maybe one tesseract wrapper? I recall working with PDFs in .NET being a nightmare. I think we had to buy a license to some software because there wasn’t a free offering. Python has several.

This is VERY important because we as software engineers, even if we wanted to reinvent the wheel sometimes, have very limited time. It takes an obscene number of man hours to develop a SalesForce or a Facebook or even something smaller like a Linux distro.

[ergonaught]

> Packaging and deployment will soon be solved problems ...

I hope so. Every time I engage in a "Why I began using Go aeons ago" conversation, half of the motivation was this. The reason I stopped engaging in them is because most of the participants apparently cannot see that this is even a problem. Performance was always the second problem (with Python); this was always the first.

[pjmlp]

Is the new BASIC, Pascal and Lisp.

Now if only CPython also got a world class JIT, V8 style.

[screye]

Never heard of Beeware, but Astral's products have transformed my python workflow (uv, ruff).

Is Beeware that transformational ? What does Beeware do and what is its maturity level?

[whycome]

Would you say Python is a good language to learn as a beginner?

[airstrike]

As someone who spent nearly a decade with Python, I'd say 90% of people will answer "yes", so I'd like to offer a different perspective.

IMHO if you want to pick it up for a couple toy projects just to get a feel of what coding is like, then by all means try it out. But eventually you'll benefit tremendously from exploring other languages.

Python will teach you a lot of bad habits. You will feel like you know what you're doing, but only because you don't know all of the ways in which it is handwaving a lot of complexity that is inherent to writing code which you should be very much aware of.

Knowing what I know now, I wish Rust existed when I started out so that it could have been my first language. I'm never giving up the borrow checker and the type system that come with it.

But you don't have to do Rust. It's fine to work on a couple of projects in Python, then maybe something small in C (though the tooling can feel arcane and frustrating), then maybe switch it up and go with some more functional programming (FP) flavored like Lisp or F#.

I know Rust has a lot of zealots and a lot of haters, but I'm not pushing an agenda. I just think it strikes that perfect balance between being extremely expressive, clear to read (after maybe a month of writing it daily), strong type system, lots of FP elements, no OOP clutter but super powerful traits, the borrow checker which you'll invariably learn to love, and more...

This will give you a strong foundation upon which you'll be able to continuously build knowledge. And even if you start with Rust, you should definitely explore Python, C, Lisp and F# later (or maybe Haskell instead of F#)

[system2]

With the help of GPT, I think the bad habit part is non-existent anymore. Learning it from GPT really helps people nowadays. Ask ChatGPT 4.0 some questions, and you will be shocked by how well it describes the code.

Just don't ask to fix indentations because it will do it line by line for hours. But it finds mistakes quickly and points you in the right direction.

And of course, it comes up with random non-existent modules once in a while which is cute to me.

[airstrike]

The bad habits I was thinking about were more in the line of not understanding how memory is being used (even something as simple as stack vs. heap allocation), not having a type system that forces you to think about the types of data structure you have in your system, and overall just being forced to design before coding

[system2]

I ask for help from ChatGPT before I go all in, and it creates these old-fashioned ASCII graphics to show how the flow will be. I think newcomers will not have the bad habits we have/had.

[airstrike]

That's really not enough or the same, trust me. You can't outsource your entire understanding to ChatGPT, and I say this as someone who's keen on getting help from AI assistants to write boilerplate code, rubberduck bugs or debate design decisions

[throwaway314155]

Respectfully, many of those things aren't a concern from Python's point of view. And why should they be? If your program runs imperceptibly slower, or using an insignificant amount of extra memory, any attempts to fix this are considered a premature optimization that gets in the way of what is more important to pythonistas - developer experience and high level abstractions.

Frankly, the comparison with Rust doesn't even really make sense. They are different tools for very different problems.

[airstrike]

Except it's not imperceptibly slower, it's orders of magnitude slower.

[Barrin92]

>Knowing what I know now, I wish Rust existed when I started out so that it could have been my first language

No offense but I don't think this makes any sense (or only if you take the first part of that sentence literally). It's like jumping into Calculus 3 to introduce a kid to maths. From a teaching standpoint, if you're a beginner, you can't even understand what problem Rust solves. Someone who doesn't know what manual memory management, a heap and a stack is should not be handed a borrow checker.

You can either start from the top, the old school way, teach a lisp or python as a more modern alternative and teach people symbolic computing, or you can start with C and teach people from the bottom up how computers work, but frankly throwing you into a language that basically exists to solve problems professional C++ developers have in large projects is kind of wild

[airstrike]

People were learning C and malloc long before Python came along. You don't need to start with a high level language.

Rust does way more than "solve problems professional C++ developers have". That's not a fair or accurate read of the language. I think you're misinformed.

[Barrin92]

>You don't need to start with a high level language.

I didn't say that. I said you can start with a high or low level language. I did literally mention C in my own post as a decent starting point.

Rust however is not a beginner friendly language because again, the thing that sets it apart is that it aims to solve a particular domain specific problem of programming, which is memory management, in a unique way that means nothing to a person who has never been exposed to the problem in the first place.

[chrisrodrigue]

Yeah, definitely. It's basically executable pseudocode and it's really simple for a beginner to pick up and hit the ground running for a variety of use cases.

Some people will tell you to start with C or C++ to get a better intuition for what's actually happening under the hood in Python, but that's not really necessary for most use cases unless you're doing something niche. Some of the most popular use cases for Python are webapps, data analysis, or general automation. For the 1% of use cases that Python isn't the right fit for, you can still use it to prototype or glue things together.

There are a lot of great resources out there for learning Python, but they won't necessarily teach you how to make great software. You can't go wrong with the official tutorial. https://learn.scientific-python.org/development/ is pretty terse and incorporates a lot of best practices.

[somethingsome]

I was teaching python long ago to very beginners in programming.

Honestly, the language became kinda harsh for newcomers, what we see as developpers is 'it's like pseudocode that runs'.

But a beginner is often left behind the billions of methods in each class. He is not used to documentation, and spend quite a huge amount of time learning by heart stupid things like 'len()' in this case it's '.len()' here it's '.length',etc.. For many meany methods that all have their idiosyncracies.

At least in c/(easy)c++, you need to build yourself most of it, helping the understanding.

I'm not completely against python as a first language, but it need to be teached well, and that could include working with a very minimal set of functions on every objects. Then you can expand and incorporate more and more methods that make life easier.

[silisili]

I go back and forth on this. A lot of people make good points.

In the end, my final answer is - yes. I say that because I believe it's the easiest programming language to get something working in. And getting something working is what motivates people to keep going.

If you sit them down and say 'well before you learn python you need to learn how a computer really works, here's an ASM x86 book', they're gonna probably read 10 pages, say this is boring, then go do something else. I think that because I went through that as a kid - I started reading a C++ book with no knowledge and gave up. It wasn't until I found qbasic and VB, by all marks a terrible language, that I really got motivated to learn and keep going because progress was so easy.

Python will teach you the basics - control flow, loops, variables, functions, libraries, etc. Those apply to almost every language. Then when you move to a different language, you at least know the basics and can focus on what's different or added that you didn't have or know before.

[SJC_Hacker]

Yeah, Python or Javascript should be first languages for most people.

People like flashy things, and Python and Javascript are just 10x easier to get that working. Console I/O doesn't really cut it anymore.

Later on you can deal with memory allocation, bit-twiddling, 2's complement arithmetic, lower level OS details etc.

[dpkirchner]

Not the person you replied to but I'd say definitely not. It'd be easy to pick up bad habits from python (untyped variables) and try to carry them over to other languages. It's also the king of runtime errors, which will frustrate newbies.

I think a compiled language is a better choice for people just getting started. Java is good, IMO, because it is verbose. Eventually the beginner may get tired of the verbosity and move on to something else, but at least they'll understand the value of explicit types and compile-time errors.

[SJC_Hacker]

Huh? Python variables definitely have a type. Its just determined at runtime.

The only untyped language I know, at least modern ones is assembler.

Well and C, if you make everything void*.

[IshKebab]

I would personally recommend Javascript/Typescript over Python, but Python is a reasonable option. Especially now that we have uv so you don't have to crawl through the bush of thorns that Python's terrible tooling (pip, venv etc) surrounds you with.

I would just encourage you to move on from Python fairly quickly. It's like... a balance bike. Easy to learn and teach you how to balance but you don't want to actually use it to get around.

[airstrike]

Python is too high level, slow and duck-typed to even be considered for a huge number of projects.

There is no one-size-fits-all programming language.