Everything in Python is such a hack that requires shoring up ancient software forever.

But people love the thrill of things not working, as Djikstra already pointed out.

Maybe, but in this domain (compute-bound concurrency) there’s really no free lunch. The best languages in the space performance-wise are either full of sharp edges (C++, Go), or hard to use (Rust, Haskell). The friendliest languages require acrobatics and runtime improvements like the ones in TFA in order to perform better than abysmally.

Python is mostly glue around C/C++ numerical code for the things I’ve used it for, it’s the inverse of lua. In both cases you have a language that’s easy to manipulate tacked on to one that’s fast because time spent writing code is more expensive than time spent executing it.

All of software is a hack in some way or another. You think of tradeoffs and make a decision. Theoretical purity is mostly an academic thing and Im sure you would love TCS.

Perhaps, however, this hacky language is more productive in the real world than most. What’s the point, otherwise?