[brabel]

I don’t really hate python but would absolutely never use it as a large code base main language. I think what people hate is other people trying to use a scripting language like Python in places where you have large code bases and large teams. Scripting languages in general are terrible for that as they give you almost no compile time guarantees about anything! But I always thought that for people whose main job is not programming and whose scripts don’t get larger than a couple of thousand lines, python is a good choice… though Lisp would perhaps be even better if historically it had gotten the huge mindshare and resulting ecosystem.

[t43562]

It has been repeatedly seen as a scripting language because people saw it as a replacement for perl.

Perl was the language of the big hack. It had very little to offer in the way of abstractions and OO. So you were kind of excused from writing well structured code and people wrote a lot of janky, untestable stuff in perl and carried on doing than in python.

In python, to get good code you absolutely have to have unit tests and some kind of integration tests. I worked on a roughly 50,000 line python program. It wasn't bad even though we didn't have type hints then. Occasionally we did discover embarassing bugs that a statically typed language would not have permitted but we wrote a test and closed that door.

[brabel]

Right, I know it is possible, but I have to ask why?? IF you can write a 50,000-line program, you probably could handle a better language for that. I'm on the side of wishing my languages did a lot more for me than they currently do! Rust is a good step, but I do find it taxing to write... I am currently considering some functional languages like Gleam (it compiles Erlang + JS and looks a bit like Elm, which is awesome but frontend only) and even more research stuff like Flix.

But day to day, I am happy to write Kotlin and Dart :D they give you amazing tooling and just good enough type guarantees.

Anyway, good to have a bunch of options :).