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.

> somebody decided that with Python 3.13 there would be no more precompiled wheels of numpy < 2

Wow. NumPy 2.0 was released less than a year ago and they're already starting to drop support for 1.x?! It only supports Python versions up to 3.12, all of which are themselves either unsupported or in "security fixes only" mode.

The developers plan to end-of-life 1.x entirely in less than six months time. Do they not know their target audience at all?

> 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

Yes - as Mark Lutz (author of "Learning Python") puts it [0]: "[Python's] evolution is largely driven by narcissism, not user feedback" and "Python remains a constantly morphing sandbox of ideas, which is great if you just want to play in the sandbox, but lousy if you're trying to engineer reliable and durable software".

[0] https://learning-python.com/python-changes-2014-plus.html#se...