> Five years is a very long time in technology.

But it's not a long time in the OP's field of science. Unfortunately despite a strong preference for Python in the scientific community, the language's design team seem to ignore that community's needs entirely, in favour of the needs of large technology companies.

I was hopeful that in the transition from a BDFL-based governance system to a Steering Council, we would see a larger variety of experience and opinions designing the language. Instead, I don't think there has ever been a single scientist, finance worker etc on the Steering Council - it's always software developers, almost always employees of large software companies.

Thanks for understanding. I think the responses other than yours here are making me reconsider how invested my research group is in Python. I think we will be doing far more Rust and R components in the future to explore the nature of language stability and package stability.

Just this week I had difficulty integrating the work of a team member because they used some new typing features only available in Python 3.13, but we have many library dependencies on numpy < 2, and in their great wisdom somebody decided that with Python 3.13 there would be no more precompiled wheels of numpy < 2. Meaning arduous multiple-minute compilation for any new venv or Docker build, even with uv. This sort of pointless version churn, wasting many valuable research hours on investigating the chains of dependencies and which libraries are ready or not, to serve the whims of some software engineer that decides everyone must update working code to novel APIs, is not something that I experience in other languages.

Hopefully Python Steering Council members reconsider the motivation of continual churn, but it's much harder to get promoted and get acknowledgement for judicious tending of a language than it is to ship a bunch of new features. Combined with fear over Anaconda charges, Python is quickly becoming a very unfriendly place for science, or anybody else that values function over form.