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At that point, why not just use Go? It's designed to feel dynamic, provides concurrency primitives out of the box, and it's orders of magnitude faster for most tasks.

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It is a downgrade in language features, there is always PyPy.

If you don't consider static type and built in concurrency primitives features then ok, at what point does nice to have features outweigh performance gains and the robustness of static typing that directly impacts the quality of the end user experience and the readability of the code to other developers?

Python has built in concurrency support, stuff like Mypy and IDE tooling make up for the dynamic typing.

And if that isn't enough, the answer is OCaml, F#, D, C#, Java, Scala, Haskell, Kotlin, C++,... definitely not going from horse to donkey in language features.

readability of the code to other developers

I disagree that Go's insistence on verbosity improves readability. Each individual line may simpler, but the larger purpose of the code is obscured in all the "if err != nil" weeds.

My unpopular opinion is that Dart should get a lot more attention. Strong typing with null-safety, compiles to native, batteries included, and nearly as expressive as Python.

> but the larger purpose of the code is obscured in all the "if err != nil" weeds.

That's the difference between script and system programming. When writing scripts, one is only concerned about carrying out a certain task and if anything goes wrong the whole thing can bail. Systems are more robust. When things go wrong they cannot just fail. They need to recover gracefully and do something meaningful in the failed state.

Handing failure conditions is the primary purpose of system code. Irrespective of Go, there is something to be said about some kind of identifier that says "take note: this is the most important code in the application!" If that comes across as being 'weedy', you know that you really needed a scripting language, not a systems language.

Different tools for different jobs.

Go still picked a terrible option. The `?` operator in Rust is way better, proving that systems languages don't have to suffer Go's choice.

That is quite different. ? in Rust signifies "this code is not important"

Which even in systems is unavoidable, to be fair. Sometimes failure just isn't important. The division between systems and scripts is not perfect. But, that will be the uncommon case in systems. It is not certain that really needs a symbol in which to draw attention. (An implementation may need a symbol, but that's beyond this discussion)

I'm not sure why you think it's unimportant. You seem to be confusing its purpose, and making distinction between systems and scripts that doesn't apply here.

Rust's whole error handling, including the ? operator work great for embedded systems where Go isn't enough of a systems language to even run.

EDIT: I think you're confused. The ? operator says "I'm not handling this specially here". That doesn't mean the error is just propagated to the top like an uncaught exception in a Python script. It allows you any level of granular handling you'd like.

Python has excellent exception handling, and its corollary to if err != nil would be try/except blocks everywhere.

That said, I hate Go for unrelated reasons, and love Python.

Go's exception handling (panic/recover) is very much like most other languages with exception handling, including Python. It is there to use when you have exceptions.

But we're talking about expected failure (network failure, hardware failure, etc.), not exceptional cases (programmer error). You would not want to carry 'expecteds' on exception handlers. Different tools for different jobs.

That said, systems transcend Go. The discussion isn't about Go, or Python, specifically.

Write an exception handler so you handle the errors.

Plenty of go code doesn't handle errors, just pretends to but doesn't do anything meaningful when they happen.

In fairness, if you are choosing a language based on language features, you are not going to choose Python either.

Python is quite rich in language features, C++ like, most people tend to think it is like BASIC, but it definitly isn't.

Yep. Some people complain about C# having too many bells and whistles these days, but Python matches almost 1:1 in language features. It’s vast.

Why not? The ecosystem might as well be a language feature, and Python has one of the strongest for a lot of areas, not just ML.

Also, what is Python lacking that other languages have? It's expressive and fast to develop, and with type hints and linters, reasonably robust.

My main complaint is performance, but I'll take the speed to write most days.

TCO, multiline lambda, fluids/parameters, to name a few.

TCO is available in Python if you want it. Multiline lambdas can be had by abusing the walrus operator, but in a language that supports nested functions it's a bit pointless. Assuming you meant fluents, you can write most languages in that style if you want to, including Python.

TCO is available if I want it? How? Do you mean writing a slow decorator, that performs some stack magic and that I need to add everywhere? Does it cover all the cases? Like mutually tail recursive functions?

Abusing the walrus operator — Well, it is abuse then and hard to read.

I actually mean: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Paramete...

It isn't as if Go provides those features, which was the suggested alternative to Python.

Ah, OK, I guess I lost context there. I was just thinking in general, what I am missing in Python.

It was suggested that neither Go nor Python would be chosen if language features are what you are after. Pointing out that both lack a certain feature only reiterates why one would not chose either of them.

I've introduced mypy to a project in the past. It was part of taking an older, low quality code base and stabilizing it into something useful. Sometimes you can't just throw it all away and start over and need a gradual approach that will start paying some dividends immediately. mypy fits that bill.

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