From an outsiders perspective: The ecosystem is a disaster, on a level even exceeding that of JavaScript IMO. The 2->3 transition was awful and lead to a rift in the python community for years (still causes issues 15 years later). Maintainers seem happy to introduce breaking changes without major version bumps. It's not that performant of a language (slower than modern Ruby, for example). Best thing it's got going for it is readability.
I have literally used it instead of writing a curl one liner because I didn't feel like looking up the arguments.
Python is incredible for building tools, exactly like a small time machinist might build certain cutters for a part they are manufacturing, or a blacksmith build tools, or a welder building a jig, etc etc
I cannot fathom when people choose to build heavyweight or long lived applications and business products with it. Django is alright I guess, except that complicated database stuff will cause you problems eventually, and migrations are a lot of fuss for not as many guarantees as you would hope for the effort.
Developer productivity.
> Maintainers seem happy to introduce breaking changes without major version bumps
Nah. Keep in mind that this is a PEP, not an announcement of what is going to happen, see also https://peps.python.org/pep-0313/ .
I've never dealt with dependency issues with Python, but I've also not had to work with large projects with lots of dependences where conflicting transient dependencies became an issue.
> The 2->3 transition was awful and lead to a rift in the python community for years (still causes issues 15 years later)
At this point, this isn't really true. The 2->3 transition was a huge debacle, but at this point, it's water under the bridge. The only people still struggling are those that are stuck with a legacy code base written in 2.x.
> Maintainers seem happy to introduce breaking changes without major version bumps.
What's changed since 3.0 that's breaking, other than when async/await got added?
> It's not that performant of a language
I'll give you that. It's slow. But most would argue that if you're writing your core work and computations in Python, you're doing it wrong. Python is best treated as a glue between libraries written in a more performant language.
> Best thing it's got going for it is readability.
And there's the big reason for it.
Readability counts. It's huge. Code is read far more than it is written. Readability is why I consider Perl and Haskell as the antitheses of Python.
Basically, you choose Python when speed of development is more important than speed of execution.
I agree, though, that the ecosystem has many rough edges, especially when it comes to package management, dependency management, and environments/containers. This is especially true in the AI ecosystem, especially as a researcher, where I had to deal with third-party code that is sometimes written by people who are solid scientists but have little software engineering experience.
I'm now back in academia as a teaching-oriented professor; it's been a few months now since I've had to use pip and conda, though I have written some Python scripts to aid with grading. I teach C++ and Haskell to undergrads now, and I also have side projects involving Scheme and Common Lisp :).