[mb7733]

I used to agree with this completely, but type annotations & checking have made it much more reasonable. I still wouldn't choose it for a large project, but types have made it much, much easier to work with others' python code.

Python with strict type checking and its huge stdlib is my favourite scripting language now.

[IshKebab]

I agree, it's not too bad if you enable strict Pyright checking in CI, and you use `uv` and you don't care remotely about performance.

That's quite a lot of ifs though. Tbh I haven't found anything significantly better for scripting though. Deno is pretty nice but Typescript really has just as many warts as Python. At least it isn't so dog slow.

[Pxtl]

I've pretty much embraced PowerShell for scripting. The language is warty as hell and seems to be entirely made of sharp edges but I've gotten used to it and it does have a lot of excellent ideas.

[IshKebab]

Yeah I'm toying with nushell which is like Powershell but with a less offensive syntax.

But when I say "scripting" I don't mean shell scripting. I mean stuff like complex custom build systems or data processing pipelines. I would never do those in any shell language.

[Pxtl]

Actually while I use it heavily for shell scripting, it's also also my go-to for python-style scripting too. Mostly because it's the one I'm most familiar with because of professionally doing DevOps on an MS stack with a lot of legacy stuff, but still:

It's just object-y enough to be excellent at filtering and shunting and translating records from API endpoints to CSV files to SQL data rows, etc. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anybody to pick up because of all the sharp ends (eg it uses Javascript falseyness except SQL NULL has the ADO.Net "DBNull" which isn't falsey) but because I'm so familiar with it I find it quite good at that stuff.

As much as people bag on the syntax (like the operators all starting with hyphen, and all the .NET functions speak with an accent), the real problem is how many edge-cases are in there, like strange behaviors of the error stream, overcomplicated scope rules, FileSystem providers for the registry and SQL server and other objects no reasonable person would ever want to use as a "file", empty-array objects getting silently converted into null, etc.

[instig007]

> Python with strict type checking and its huge stdlib is my favourite scripting language now.

It's time to try Scala 3 with Java libs' inbound interop: https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/book/scala-features.html