I work in python daily, it's not necessarily my favourite language, but I'd say it's mostly fine.

What languages are you thinking of specifically when you mention better thought out ones?

Pretty much every other mainstream language bar JS. I'd say also Ruby because I also do not like a lot of its choices, but there's at least a kind of heady elegance to it in a REPL, though I would never want to work on a production system written in Ruby.

Frankly, I just really prefer statically and strongly typed compiled languages.

I did my last company's first Demo and MVP in Python after running through the Koans at my co-founder's behest and ultimately we decided that the production system would not be done in Python. There are some cool things about it - specifically I do like that annotations are real AOP seams, but the numerous footguns and lack of types and a compiler just make it a very annoying ecosystem to work in for me.

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pphysch 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They are a heavy C# user. Coke/Pepsi situation.

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jelloroll42 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Java would be Coke to C#'s Pepsi

	▲	pphysch 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Those are closer languages but my broader point is that these application-level languages are more or less interchangeable from a professional standpoint. A Java or C# pro should probably not spend time becoming a Python pro because they could have spent that time producing equivalent value in the languages they are already experts in.

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stackghost 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't agree at all that it's a coke/pepsi situation. That analogy is for when two mostly-interchangeable choices develop tribal followings based largely on personal preference. Coke and Pepsi are both caramel carbonated soft drinks that are terrible for your health differing only slightly in flavour. Otherwise they're materially identical.

C# is strongly/statically typed, compiled, and quite fast (after the vm has started), whereas python is weakly/dynamically typed, interpreted, and generally slow as fuck. Those are two fundamentally different languages, how could it possibly be a coke/pepsi situation?

I think python is fantastic for certain use cases: gluing other tools together (like LAPACK or other ancient libraries), system automation, prototyping, exploitation (I think pretty much all of us were working on stealmybitcoin in python), and exploratory data analysis.

The problems arise when people try to write, say, gigantic GUI applications in python, or really anything with CPU-bound workloads. Part of being an engineer is using the right tool for the right job. Python is the wrong tool for lots of jobs. That shouldn't be a controversial statement.

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Jtsummers 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> whereas python is weakly/dynamically typed

It's strongly/dynamically typed, not weakly typed. Why do people keep getting this wrong? Has any version of Python been weakly typed? I know Python 2 and 3 aren't, perhaps the first version or ABC, its predecessor language.

	▲	wtetzner 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Why do people keep getting this wrong? It's kinda funny to say people are getting it "wrong" when strong/weak typing isn't really defined anywhere or universally agreed upon. In fact, even "dynamic typing" can be considered to be an oxymoron, since types are formally defined to be a static property of a language. A more correct term would be "uni-typed". I'm not saying that the meanings you're using for static/dynamic and weak/strong are bad, just that chastising someone for getting them "wrong l" doesn't make sense for terms that are not widely agreed upon.

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pphysch 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Numpy is over 2 decades old. Pytorch is a decade old. Python devs know what "right tool for the job" means and focus on solving problems instead of being language purists.

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stackghost 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This has nothing to do with purism. I use python all the time, where it makes sense.

What I don't do is cultivate a "favorite language" and make it my whole identity, and then take criticism of that language as some sort of personal affront. Python objectively has some serious flaws. That shouldn't make anyone emotional, and I don't know why people get their backs up like this.

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pphysch 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Who is cultivating a "favorite language"? I missed that part. Agreed that this should not be an emotional issue, that is unprofessional.

Problem with any popular language is an outsider sees one or two statistically-likely codebases that are total turds, and then gets one-shot by the Goomba fallacy.

	▲	stackghost 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Who is cultivating a "favorite language"? I don’t know, but deflecting criticism of a language by calling it “language purism” seems pretty emotional to me.