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by gshulegaard 332 days ago
I feel like this started/greatly accelerated when Guido stepped down as BDFL. Python at is on a path where the essence of what made it popular (readable, well designed, productive) is being crushed under the weight of it’s popularity. The language now feels bloated and needlessly complex in areas that were previously limited, but simple.

I recently chased down a bug where something was accidentally made a class variable because a type hint was left off it by accident and it clicked for me that Python is not the same language I loved at the start of my career.
4 comments
anal_reactor 332 days ago
The problem with any project is that at some point it's essentially complete, and all we need is small maintenance to keep it going. Google used to have an algorithm that pretty much solved web search. Tinder solved dating. Spotify solved music delivery. The problem is, you're sitting with a hundred managers and a thousand engineers and all these people expect growth. So you have to keep going, even if the only direction is down, because if you don't, you'll be forced out of organization and replaced by someone who does. So you do go down. And then everyone's surprised and playing the blame game.
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pansa2 332 days ago
> I recently chased down a bug where something was accidentally made a class variable because a type hint was left off it by accident

That's the reverse situation to one I've come across - a novice accidentally wrote `a : 4` instead of `a = 4` and was surprised that `a` was still undefined. There was no error because the `4` was interpreted as a type hint.

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pansa2 332 days ago
> I feel like this started/greatly accelerated when Guido stepped down as BDFL

Same, but I don't think that's the direct cause. Guido was actually in favor of all these features (as well as Walrus, of course) - so it's not like he would have vetoed them if he were still BDFL.

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ifwinterco 331 days ago
It's funny because a lot of OSS suffers from neglect.

But Python and a few other popular OSS (TypeScript is another example) have the opposite problem: too much development time is spent on them, too many features are added, and the language bloats and becomes less nice to use

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