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Comment by Zarathust | Hacker News Reader

"Viable" as in "you have no other choice sometimes". This forces you to deal with 3 libraries each with their own quirks, pitfalls and incompatibilities. Sometimes you even deal with dependencies reimplementing some parts in a 4th or 5th library to deal with shortcomings.

I really don't care that much which of them survive, I just want to rely on less of them

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No, it's just useful. They are techs with different trade off, and life is full of opportunities.

Python Zen = one obvious way to do it. Having a bunch of very different ones, each with serious disadvantages, is a bad look.

Zen of Python is an ideal, and at this point, kind of tongue-in-cheek.

This is the same language that shipped with at least 3 different methods to apply functions across iterables when the Zen of Python was adopted as a PEP in 2004.

There is at least some recognition in those cases that they introduced the new thing because they got it wrong in the old thing. That's different than saying they should co-exist on equal terms.

> That's different than saying they should co-exist on equal terms.

I'm not sure who is claiming that. Here's the OP we're replying to:

> They are techs with different trade off, and life is full of opportunities.

Yes, that says each has good and bad points and you should weigh them against each other in the context of your application, to figure out which one to use. I.e. equal terms.

Zen would be: pick one of the two approaches, keep its strengths while fixing it to get rid of its weaknesses, then declare the fixed version as the one obvious way to do it. You might still have to keep the other one around for legacy support, but that's similar to the situation with applying functions across iterables.

This is what Go did. Go has one way to do concurrency (goroutines) and they are superior to both of Python's current approaches. Erlang has of course been in the background all along, doing something similar.

It's a technical thread, not a political one. If you were so sure of your argument, you wouldn't use a throwaway.

Besides, it's weird, like saying we should not have int, float and complex, there should be one way to do it.

Just because those are 3 numbers doesn't mean they don't have each their own specific benefit.

int, float, and complex are for different purposes. async and threads paper over each others' weaknesses, instead of fixing the weaknesses at the start. Async itself is an antipattern (technical opinion, so there) but Python uses it because of the hazards and high costs of threads. Chuck Moore figured out 50 years ago to keep the async stuff out of the programmer's way, when he put multitasking into Polyforth, which ran on tiny machines. Python (and Node) still make the programmer deal with it.

If you look at Haskell, Erlang/Elixir, and Go, they all let you write performant sequential code by pushing the async into the runtime where the programmer doesn't have to see it. Python had an opportunity to do the same, but stayed with async and coroutines. What a pain.

Oh, you meant like, why don't Python didn't reimplement the whole interpreter around concurrency instead of using the tools it already had to find solutions to problems?

Well, that question is as old as engineering itself, and it's always a matter of resources, cost, history and knowledge.

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