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Comment by tarsinge | Hacker News Reader

> I've been seeing a growing anti-python sentiment lately

Not speaking for the quality of the article, but on that sentiment: maybe it's just that the pro-python sentiment is eroding. I'm glad it's becoming kind of ok to criticise that language, after years of it being untouchable (at its core, not the 2 -> 3 migration). At least that's my sentiment as someone who really doesn't like it (but I'm a professional, I still use it when it's a best tool for the job, it's just a pain). I'm sure just saying that is still suspicious, and saying that I prefer JS (modern) to Python will still get me more than raised eyebrows for at least a few more years.

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> I'm glad it's becoming kind of ok to criticise that language, after years of it being untouchable

I've only been following Python for a little over 20 years of it's ~30 year life, but I don't remember it ever being “untouchable”, or even just “untouched” by criticism.

Up until mid-2000s, no one had heard of Python. Then there was maybe ten years of “Whitespace? No!” But from say 2012 on there was a big movement of data science and education into Python and its general reputation was quite good.

Edit: the XKCD antigravity comic was December 2007, so pretty early on all things considered. PG’s Python Paradox was 2004.

> But from say 2012 on there was a big movement of data science and education into Python and its general reputation was quite good.

When Python became popular in education, particularly for first CS courses, is when the public criticism from Scheme, Java, and and C partisans really skyrocketed.

Yeah, it has had recently a generally good reputation. That doesn't mean that it has been untouchable and immune to criticism.

I’ll agree with that. I think it’s more that the criticisms of the loudest voices has shifted. Once it was “why use an obscure language” then “ugh whitespace” then “dynamic typing is bad” and now more “it’s jumped the shark.”

>Up until mid-2000s, no one had heard of Python

You'd be surprised. Python was used quite a lot in early 00s.

Ruby is the one that was a curiosity few used at that point, until Rails came.

Python was my preferred language for many years, and I still use it for processing CSV files with low development time, but JavaScript has gotten so much better now that I prefer it overall. Python has a better ecosystem but JavaScript has a better dependency management story, so those two factors sort of wash each other out.

I've observed the weird phenomenon that any valid criticism of Python is treated as either some kind of personal attack or because you're a mad static typing ideologue.

Adding to the list “oh if it’s not fast enough, just write it in C”

As if wishing for any performance that’s an improvement on bottom-of-the-barrel is some kind of wild, unreasonable ask for which the solution is “write it in a language full of pitfalls, sharp edges and an even worse packaging and developer experience than the current one? Seriously?

To be honest I feel like most criticisms against any languages are bound to sooner or later be met with the response "well, this is how this language works, and if you don't like it pick another". If you criticize a weakly typed language for an issue that is solved by strong typing, you could even argue that they are correct in saying so, unless you come up with a way to solve it without types.

I suspect that the reason that it's so common to be initially suspected of being an ideologue is that there are so many out there, and they are very vocal compared to the majority that often couldn't care less. So if you don't come up with alternate solutions, maybe the tendency is to assume you're getting at the old trope they've already heard before.

As an example I recently had someone say that "best practices" are just as good at avoiding the kinds of things a static type system catches. Python seems to be (for whatever reason) a language that creates this kind of ideology with the kind of tropes everyone has heard before.

You lost me at: “I prefer JS (modern) to Python”. Just... how?

As someone who's not a fan of JS in the browser, https://github.com/denoland/deno is _shockingly_ nice for "script-sized" tasks that need more performance than bash+jq makes easy.

What "how"? Have you modern tried server side JS?

> JS (modern)

LOL. JS is what, 25 years old, versus Python at 30.

I think the reference is to modern JS as in ES6 or TypeScript

LOL, it's about "modern JS", not JS being new.

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